RICHFIELD, Ohio – The kid’s checked out on him. Just look at the eyes.
The tiny bat sits ready on his shoulder, his grip is major-league right, but the eyes betray him. They slide away from Eric Wedge, bent at the waist two steps away. They look past Wedge and past a visitor and toward the big TV behind them both, where at the moment Clifford the Big Red Dog is infinitely more fascinating to 1-year-old Cash Wedge, than the soft fabric baseball his father is holding in his hand.
“Haven’t got him,” Wedge says with a chuckle, waggling the ball in vain.
And some people will tell you this is a metaphor for what happened to him this summer a few miles up the pike in Cleveland – that he didn’t have his team there, either, and that’s why his Indians, picked by some to make the World Series, stumbled from the gate and then augured into a 7-22 September death spiral that cost Wedge his job just two seasons after he was the American League Manager of the Year.
They’ll tell you, these people, that he was a lousy communicator. That he lost his team and couldn’t get it back. That he wasn’t this and he wasn’t that and, mostly, he wasn’t that mystic, indefinable Other Thing.
Here’s what he is, though: A man trying very hard to be big about this.
“I know what happened the last couple of years,” he says, as Merle Haggard plays softly in the background. “I don’t broadcast it just out of respect to everybody that’s involved. Plus, you can’t really talk about that, because then it makes it look like you’re making excuses. And that’s the last thing I want to do.”
Instead he will do what he’s always done – ignore the TV and the babblers on talk radio, not read the papers, and retreat to his sprawling, tasteful home tucked into the back of a peaceful enclave whose street names (Robert Burns, Bannockburn, Galloway) betray a Scottish theme.
He can hide back here, he says, among wooded ravines that burn yellow and bronze with the last of October’s fire. Spend time with his wife, Kate, and their kids, Cash and Eva. Draw another cup of coffee and pad around the house in his sock feet, giving his visitor the 50-cent tour.
Here’s a guitar and a photo of Johnny Cash, one of his heroes. Here’s a cardboard cutout of his main man, John Wayne. Here’s a hockey stick signed by Wayne Gretzky and a rack full of jerseys and a trophy case that includes everything from his 2007 AL Manager of Year trophy to a tiny Komets hockey stick to a newspaper clipping from the day Northrop beat No. 1 Elmhurst in sectionals.
And over here?
It’s a scorecard from this season, Indians over Yankees, Wedge’s 500th win as the Tribe’s manager. General manager Mark Shapiro had it framed and presented it to him to commemorate the moment.
“Couple days later he fired me,” Wedge says.
It doesn’t sound as bitter as it reads. In truth, he’s appreciative of how Shapiro and owners Larry and Paul Dolan handled his firing; everything he asked them to do they did, and when the time came to pull the trigger, there was an air about it that suggested this was a most reluctant parting.
Wedge asked to be told when the decision was made, a week before it was made public.
For seven days, he kept it to himself, not even telling his coaches.
“I wasn’t gonna have them carry that around that long,” he says.
Announcing it before the final road trip to Boston was his idea, too.
“I wanted the players to know so we could have some closure and be done, and … so they could all pick their spot and come talk to me,” he says.
A lot of them did. Behind the bar in the basement, Wedge sips his coffee and chuckles now, remembering how catcher Kelly Shoppach – whose chops he mercilessly busted about Shoppach’s iced coffees – drank it Wedge-style (hot and black) that last week. He talks about how hard it was when Victor Martinez left for Boston, and how, after that last game in Fenway, Martinez stuck his head into the cramped visitors’ clubhouse to say hi, then sat down and talked for two hours.
“Those things are special,” Wedge says.
And so it was hard for him, really hard, when the season went south and management started selling the team for parts. The 2007 Cy Young winner, CC Sabathia, and Casey Blake were already gone. Now here went 2008 Cy Young winner Cliff Lee and Ryan Garko and Martinez, the All-Star catcher.
“You’ve got to keep in mind, it was a different team (at the end),” he says. “A lot of the players I’d been around the last six or seven years were all traded or gone.”
And now Wedge turns on the TV, and here are Lee and Sabathia squaring off in the World Series. Here are 12 or 13 former Indians – kids he watched get married and buy houses and have kids of their own, all the things a man sees in seven years on the job – making the playoffs in other places.
Tough to take.
“Once we traded everybody, we didn’t have a whole lot of ammo to go out there with,” Wedge says, as Merle Haggard gives way to Randy Travis in the background. “So, yeah, I sensed what was going to happen. Most realistic change is the manager. I understood that.
“But I’m the same guy I was two years ago. Nothing’s changed. After the season was over last year, I had more people tell me it was my greatest managerial year I’d ever had.
“It’s ironic that 80 games later you’re at your worst.”
Already, he says, a couple of GMs have called, dangling offers to be a special assistant. He could do that, he says. Or he could take 2010 off, spend the time with Kate and the kids he’s had to give up as a major-league manager, wait for what he guesses will be more managerial openings next fall than this.
“Without a doubt, I want to manage again,” Wedge says, as Randy Travis sings about love found and love lost, about heartache and hard times.
“I hope I get the opportunity. I don’t assume that I get the opportunity. I hope I get the opportunity.”
