Dodgers in uncomfortable wait mode with Hanley Ramirez injury

Certainty isn’t normally a part of the injury business, unless of course it’s determined you need to go under the knife.

Each injury tends to take its own path -- short, long, unexpected turns, easy, tough.

Hanley Ramirez has a thumb injury, and apparently it’s not serious. He came out of Saturday’s game after the third inning with a sore right thumb, which is scary since he had surgery on the same thumb before the start of last season.

The X-rays were negative; the Dodgers called it a bruise and said he was day to day. Everyone exhaled. Manager Don Mattingly said the knob of the bat simply hit his thumb wrong when he hit a ball off the end and grounded out in the third.

“It has nothing to do with the surgery,” Ramirez said. “The thumb just went numb.”

When trainer Stan Conte worked on him during the third in the dugout, he appeared to be concentrating on the outside of the hand by the thumb. When Mattingly described the injury, he pointed to the inside of the hand at the base of the thumb. And Ramirez pointed to the top inside of the thumb itself.

Mattingly said for five days he had planned to give Ramirez the day off Sunday, which, coupled with Monday’s off-day, would give him consecutive days off.

Ramirez, however, talked like since he had missed most of Saturday’s game, he hoped to play Sunday, not sit.

“That was ahead of time,” Ramirez said. “I don’t know yet. It depends.”

But Ramirez said the thumb was still numb, long after the game. Certainty has yet to appear.