Adam Jones: Center of Attention

Adam Jones is in an enviable position

Although he’s just 22, he earns hundreds of thousands of dollars and soon is likely to become a millionaire. He travels the country first class. He has a tony home on the Baltimore waterfront. He is starting center fielder for the Orioles with a bright future and the possibility of becoming a star.

A lot of people, obviously, would like to be in his spikes.

But it wasn’t always like this for Jones.

He grew up in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of southeast San Diego where drugs, guns and gangs were as omnipresent as balls and bats are in his life today. His parents split up when he was a tot. He didn’t live with either his mother or his father during his last year of high school. A lot of the people Jones knew and came in contact with are no longer alive. Some were killed in gang shootings.

Yet Jones was able to escape the fate that devoured so many of his school mates and their families, largely because he had a few precious things going in his favor: a caring older brother and the athletic ability — and the will — to keep him away from the streets and on the athletic fields.

His older brother, Anson Wright, had also been a good athlete. But Anson occasionally went astray, or “made a few wrong steps,” in Jones’ words, and things didn’t pan out for him. But then Wright had a son of his own, turned his life around, and made sure his younger brother avoided the gang life that once had attracted him.

Wright thus became a guide, a mentor, and a guardian angel to Jones.

“He kept me out of trouble, making sure I didn’t do the things he did,” says Jones. “He made sure I made the right decisions and maintained my personality and stayed the kind of guy that I am.”

As a senior at Morse High School in San Diego, Jones lived with Wright. His father lived in Los Angeles, and his mother resided in a different county, although Jones did see her regularly. His brother assured that Jones got to school every day and watched him play baseball when he could. “He was more of an influence on me growing up than my parents,” says Jones. “I’m not saying my life would have gone differently had it not been for him, but he was the one person who really helped me out.

As a kid Jones loved basketball. Just like Anson. “Everything was through my big brother,” says the Oriole center fielder. “When he played basketball, my stepbrother and I played basketball with him. I liked every sports team that he liked — except the Oakland A’s. He liked the Bulls, I liked the Bulls. He liked the ’Niners, I liked the ’Niners.”

When he was 12, after the basketball season had ended, a friend asked Jones if he’d like to play a little baseball. “So I said OK,” Jones remembers. “And I started to like it.” He could run and had a good arm, although it took him a little while to learn how to hit.

Jones played shortstop and pitched in Pony League. Ditto for high school.

He excelled at baseball as a high school freshman. The next year, scouts started to come. By his junior year, they multiplied, and as a senior, flocks of scouts came to watch Jones pitch and play short.

He considered going to San Diego State University, where Tony Gwynn, the great former Padre, was the coach. Jones did well academically at school. He liked it but thought studying was boring. And he wanted to play baseball. So rather than going to college, Jones signed a contract with the Seattle Mariners, soon after they drafted him in the first round of the 2003 free agent draft. “I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to play and help my family financially,” he says.

Like his neighbor in the Oriole outfield, Nick Markakis, Jones was viewed as having the talent to be either a pitcher or position player in professional baseball. “Some scouts liked my pitching better,” he says. “I threw 92-96 or 97 and had a good curve. And a lot of scouts thought I’d never hit my way here.” The Mariners asked if he had a preference.

“I had a lot of potential to be a pitcher,” he reports, “but I always wanted to hit. I wanted to hit and play shortstop. And I told them if that doesn’t pan out in a couple of years, and you don’t think I’m going anywhere as a hitter, and my arm is still good, I wouldn’t mind pitching to see what I could do in that regard. But I really wanted to stick it to all those scouts who thought my bat

was suspect.”

So Jones became a professional hitter. The Mariners like his speed and switched him from the infield to the outfield in 2005. He hit .291 with 67 home runs in four-plus seasons in the minor league, with his numbers improving every year. He spent the latter part of 2006 and 2007 with Seattle and was named the organization’s Minor League Player of the Year in both seasons.

Jones was the centerpiece of the trade that sent the Orioles’ pitching ace, Erik Bedard, to Seattle during this past offseason. The Orioles received five players for Bedard, but Jones was clearly the one they most coveted, the player that they saw as an integral part of their future.

Yet he initially demurs when asked how it feels to be the key acquisition in a deal for one of the best pitchers in the American League.

“I wouldn’t say it was primarily for me, because we also got (new Oriole closer) George Sherrill,” Jones says modestly. “But it’s very humbling to be traded for a guy that good. I know the Mariners didn’t want to give me up, but they really wanted (Bedard). And I know Baltimore really wanted me. So I think it’s something of a tribute to my success that Baltimore would want me over here to don the black and orange.”

At first, Jones harbored some misgivings about being sent from the organization that signed him out of high school. After all, Seattle is considered a contender in the American League West, while the Orioles were a fourth place team in the highly competitive AL East last year. And as a lifetime West Coaster, he now was being sent across the country to play baseball.

It was an ex-Oriole, however, who convinced Jones that playing in Baltimore would be a fortuitous career move for him. That ex-Oriole is Mark McLemore. Although two decades older than Jones, McLemore grew up in the same southeast San Diego neighborhood as the Oriole center fielder, attended the same high school, and even studied under the same English teacher.

“He told me,” recalls Jones, “’You know, this is going to be a great move for you. Seattle’s going to be more of a pressure situation, because they’re expected to win.’ Then he said, ’You’re going to go over to Baltimore, and you’re not going to worry about the pressure. You’re young. You’re going to get the opportunity to go over there and play every day and relish it.’”

Still, Jones will not totally escape the vice of public pressure when he patrols center field for the Orioles. Baltimoreans are hungry for a winner, and Jones has been portrayed as someone who could be instrumental in the team’s hoped-for return to respectability. While it might take some time for the Orioles to reach that level of play, people will be looking to Jones not only to help carry the team to that next plateau, but also as a symbol of the team’s rejuvenation.

That’s not necessarily a role Jones says he’s comfortable with.

“I’m not talking about being a savior,” he explains. “I’m going to go out there and do what I have to do, play the game right, play hard, and hopefully become real successful at what I’m doing.”

There is no question that a great deal is being expected of Jones, and perhaps that is unfair.

He’s not even five years out of high school and began this season with not even 150 big league at-bats.

So Oriole manager Dave Trembley, though he likes what he’s seen of Jones this spring, is not yet ready to anoint the youngster as the Michelangelo of his team’s Renaissance.

“He’s got the tools,” says Trembley. “He’s going to get better, he’s going to get bigger, he’s going to get stronger.” But the manager is rightfully cautious when asked if Jones is a five-tool player, the type who can propel a franchise to success.

“I don’t know,” Trembley responds. I’ve got to see him play more.”

Jones is intelligent and self-assured, while also being respectful of those around him.

He says his mother was the first one to notice in him the propensity for sizing up a situation before jumping into it.

“My mom always told me that I was big-time observant,” says Jones. “I told her I wasn’t, but to tell the truth, I am. I like to be observant of people. I like to know who and what I’m around. I don’t want to do anything that might cause discomfort to anybody. I don’t want anyone to really feel uncomfortable around me.”

And in that way, he and Markakis share another trait. They both lay back a bit when they join a new group, assessing the different personalities, before they engage others. They might be seen as shy, but they really are both just cautious when it comes to new social — or work — situations.

“When I first came here (to the Oriole clubhouse), the first day, I wasn’t really talking to anyone,” says Jones. “I introduced myself — ’How are you doing?’ — but then I was off (to the side) a little bit, just observing everything.”

Markakis was the same way when he joined the Orioles two years ago.

Now the two men will play side-by-side in the Oriole outfield. And if the organization’s hopes are ever realized, team officials foresee the two young players as being fixtures in the Camden Yards outfield for years to come and helping transform the Orioles into a competitive club.

Jones was helped along the way by a number of coaches and by his big brother. But he also knows that it’s up to him now, that if he is to be a quality major leaguer, he can’t rely on anyone else.

“I try to live my life,” says the 22-year-old. “I don’t try to really depend on other people. I like to depend on myself. I’m a real independent person. If I need help with something, I’ll try to find a way to do it myself before I ask for help.”

Yet he also knows that he was helped by the environment he once lived in, despite the potential pitfalls he faced.

“My past is going to help me for the future,” Jones says. “Everything that I grew up with — the trials, the tribulations and the troubles—I think have made me a better person.”