X-Rays on J.J. Hardy's foot have Orioles "very concerned"; CT scan to come

The Orioles added another player to their list of injury worries on Sunday afternoon. J.J. Hardy fouled a ball off of his foot in the fourth inning of the O's loss to the White Sox. Hardy came out of the game in the top of the sixth inning.

In his customary post-game session, manager Buck Showalter responded to the question, "How's J.J. doing?" with the answer, "I don't know." Showalter went on to say, without being specific, that the X-rays taken on Hardy's foot revealed things that the Orioles want to follow up on with a CT scan tomorrow. He also said that he knew more than he would let on publicly about the situation.

The Baltimore Sun's Peter Schmuck reported that the X-rays have O's officials "very concerned" and raised the possibility that the injury may be a fracture of some kind.

Showalter indicated that the team will probably know the results of the CT scan around 12 or 1pm tomorrow. Given that most injury information is disseminated to reporters when they're at the stadium and tomorrow is a day off for the team, it's anybody's guess when we'll know Hardy's status.

An easy tell about whether the O's are going to expect to put Hardy on the disabled list will be in whether a player, probably Ryan Flaherty, is summoned from Norfolk.

If Hardy has to miss an extended amount of time, how might the O's set up in his absence? Sunday's game finished with Manny Machado playing shortstop and Pedro Alvarez playing third base. Any number of other weird and probably less than ideal scenarios present themselves. Or they could just make Flaherty the shortstop most of the time and leave everyone else in their usual spots.

At this point, it seems unlikely that there will be good news to be had about Hardy and the only question is how bad the news will be.