When the Tigers took Ryan Raburn off the active roster in late July, and sent him to the disabled list, it was because he had a thumb sprain.

When the Tigers got the utility player back at the start of September, he was still struggling with an injury, albeit a different one — a strain of his right quadriceps muscle. They thought they'd let it heal up enough before using him in a game a full week later but, after two starts and a pinch-hit appearance later, it's still an issue.

So the Tigers put him back on the 15-day disabled list Thursday morning.

While Raburn was hitting just .171 for the season (and 1-for-7 since his return to the roster in September), his potential value to the squad was his ability to hit left-handed pitching. At one point, manager Jim Leyland was asked the plan for where Raburn would play on his rehab stint.

The answer? More or less, this: "It doesn't matter where they play him. As long as he's hitting lefties, he'll be back in September."

By all reports, he was doing just that, pounding the ball off lefties, before his return  — his .286 average, .571 slugging percentage and .946 OPS against lefties listed on the Mud Hens' site includes his earlier stint there in June when he wasn't hitting anyone.

His inability to hit lefties at the big-league level this season — whether through injury or ineffectiveness — was a large part of the reason the Tigers were forced to swap a couple of players to be named later for Jeff Baker, in another attempt to bolster the right-handed hitting corps.

That move failed, too, and the Tigers flipped Baker to Atlanta for another player to be named later.

It's also part of the reason rookie Avisail Garcia was rushed to the Tigers from Double-A Erie.

Should the Tigers make the playoffs, that inability — to rough up left-handed pitchers — could come back to haunt them.