BALTIMORE — You wouldn’t know it by simply viewing the final score, but the Orioles were without their best player in Tuesday’s 19-3 win over the Philadelphia Phillies.
Center fielder Adam Jones was out of the lineup with a right shoulder injury suffered when the 29-year-old was diving headfirst for a ball late in Monday’s 4-0 victory. Manager Buck Showalter said Jones underwent a magnetic resonance imaging exam, but it didn’t reveal anything too concerning moving forward.
“Everything is serious when Adam Jones misses a game, but nothing structurally that he shouldn’t be able to come back from,” Showalter said. “The question is when, whether it’s tomorrow or the next day or in Toronto. But I feel confident it will be one of those three days.”
David Lough took over in center field and hit one of eight Orioles home runs to set a new single-game franchise record on Tuesday. The 29-year-old Jones missed only his third contest of the season as Baltimore wrapped up a 7-1 homestand to climb to two games above .500 for the first time since April 19.
Jones sat out two games in late May after spraining his ankle in the first game of a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox on May 29, but Showalter said the All-Star center fielder is dealing with other ailments that warranted a respite on Tuesday.
“He’s got a banged-up toe from jamming it and he fouled a bunch of balls off [it], and he’s also got that ankle that he turned,” Showalter said. “It might be a good time to let him take a little blow. Anytime Adam talks about it and doesn’t fight it, you better multiply it times two. He talked to me earlier in the day after lunch about how he was feeling, so we were able to get ahead of it.”
