The Wedge edge
CLEVELAND – It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the most enticing of job offers.
He’d be managing a team essentially being rebuilt from scratch, relying on a roster of kids from Buffalo, Akron and that baseball hotbed, Mahoning Valley. The payroll would be meager, the All-Stars were long gone and the only big-name free agents he’d see were on other teams. The losses would be frequent and probably lopsided.
Oh, and all of this would be for a passionate fan base hardened by decades of disappointment.
A real dream job, that one, and yet Eric Wedge signed on as Cleveland Indians manager anyway.
“I was actually excited about it,” he said. “Obviously, you knew what was going to be ahead. I knew it was going to take a lot of toughness from a lot of people to be able to handle that. I just tried to surround myself with the best people I could, stay as consistent as we could with the players – which is extremely important – and just stay true to the path.
“And you have to be patient. You can’t take shortcuts. There’s no secret ingredient to doing it outside of consistency, having a plan and everybody staying on the same page.”
Five years after Wedge took over the Indians, they’re a game away from the World Series. They lead the Boston Red Sox 3-1 in the A.L. Championship Series, with Game 5 tonight at Jacobs Field.
It’s a remarkable, largely unsung turnaround, and there’s no telling where Cleveland would be if general manager Mark Shapiro hired anyone but Wedge.
A former catcher who spent parts of four seasons in the majors with Boston and Colorado, Wedge isn’t flashy or overbearing. He’s straightforward, focused and patient, and he holds tight to the lessons he learned from his parents about the value of hard work (when Wedge was introduced as Cleveland’s manager, his parents missed the news conference because it was a work day).
But his imprint is on every inch of the Indians clubhouse.
“I was just left with the underlying sense that this guy’s going to be the right partner for me,” Shapiro said. “That he was going to be someone that’s going to care as much as I care, work as hard as I work and, if there was any way for him to ensure that we succeeded, he was going to find that path.”
For much of the 1990s, the Indians were one of the American League’s premier teams. They were division champions six times in the seven-year span from 1995 to 2001, and won the A.L. pennant in 1995 and 1997. They put up monstrous offensive numbers with players like Albert Belle, Jim Thome, David Justice and Manny Ramirez, while Bartolo Colon, Dennis Martinez and Charles Nagy kept opposing teams off-balance.
But with a small-market payroll and few high draft picks, Cleveland was stuck in that impossible spot between contending and rebuilding. So Shapiro made the difficult decision to dismantle the Indians and rebuild around a core of young, homegrown players.
“The (manager’s) job that we had at that point was not a simple job of just managing the team,” Shapiro said. “I needed someone to dig in, become my partner and understand more than just getting the most out of 25 players.”
“Wedgie” was the perfect fit.
Though 34 when he was hired, he seemed – on the surface, at least – to be a no-nonsense, old-school manager. This, after all, is a guy who counts Bob Knight as a role model, and has a John Wayne calendar in his office.