Thumbs Down.

Mike Lowell seems to have the worst luck when it comes to injuries. Damage to the radial collateral ligament of the thumb, while not unheard of, is rare.

It's a short little ligament that originates at the styloid process of the radius (the little point of bone on the end of the radius) and connects to the scaphoid bone in the wrist (the lower of the two wrist bones in the picture) and the trapezium (the other wrist bone in the picture). You should be able to easily feel it in your own wrist. It's in the space between the end of the radius and the metacarpal of the thumb. The purpose of the RCL is to stabilize the wrist and to limit how far the hand will move in the direction of the pinkie finger. If you hold your right hand straight out in front of you with the wrist flat and try to move just your hand to the right, it won't go very far because of the RCL. Mikey Lowell's probably moves alarmingly further because his RCL is torn.

As to why nobody bothered to get this checked out sooner: The prescribed treatment for the injury is to splint the thumb for four or five weeks in the hope that it will heal itself before attempting surgery; so they very well may have done this. The surgery itself is fairly simple, depending on the quality of the ligament. You open up the hand and reattach the ligament. In severe cases the ligament may be too damaged to use and you'd have to do a tendon graft. Then you reset the bones and pin the joint in place.

Recovery is probably three or four weeks until you take the pin out and then an additional three weeks or so until the ligament is healed. I'd say it would probably be the beginning of March before he'd be ready to get back into the swing of things.