Brewers hope for Gomez's return from injury

CHICAGO -- Center fielder Carlos Gomez will finish serving his three-game suspension on Friday for his role in the benches-clearing incident with the Pirates in April, but it's unclear if he'll be ready for Saturday's game against the Cubs.

Gomez was removed in the sixth inning of Tuesday's game against the Pirates with lower back tightness, after which he decided he might as well drop his appeal of the suspension to rest. Even with the time off, Brewers manager Ron Roenicke said the condition of Gomez's back seems to change on a daily basis.

"Yesterday, it felt great. Today, it's not quite as good as yesterday, so I don't know what's happening again," Roenicke said. "He hurt it sleeping, just in bed too long or whatever. I don't know if it was the mattress, whatever. So I don't know if he just has to be careful with what he's doing, but especially when we go on the road with the different hotels and different beds. There's a lot of achy backs when we go to certain places."

Roenicke can only hope Gomez's back tightness doesn't become a long-term issue, given how banged up the Brewers are right now. With Aramis Ramirez on the DL with a strained hamstring and the team having recently activated Ryan Braun off the shelf, Milwaukee can ill-afford to lose another big bat.

"I'm hoping [Gomez is] OK," Roenicke said. "Originally when we talked about this, I didn't expect ... I thought that just the one day was bad, which was a day we took him out of the game. The next day, he wasn't so good, but the day after, like I said, he was really good yesterday.

"He's straight again, walking normal and I thought he'd be fine, and now they tell me it's still there. It's not that it's bad, but it's still there, which I was surprised."