Indians’ Wedge Crosses Home
By Bob Albright of the Salem News

BOSTON – It only seemed fitting that on a raw a drizzly evening on Landsdowne Street, one that gave the batting cage at Fenway Park yet another night off, Eric Wedge was in town.

Not only was he on hand to manage a baseball team – the Cleveland Indians – but also to remind folks there is indeed a place on Route 1 in Danvers which sports several cages that never get caught in the rain.

Wedge, who co-owns the indoor Strike One sports complex in Danvers, also finds time to fill out the lineup card each evening for the Cleveland Indians. He could only smile when asked if he planned to find time this weekend to check in on his other enterprise.

“We got in around 3:30 am (yesterday morning), and I was over there the first thing in the morning,” said Wedge.

“I was talking shop with my business partners and making sure everything was going OK. Strike One will always be a priority for me.”

A priority which may be a welcome diversion for Wedge, who at 35 years old is the youngest manager in Cleveland since Lou Boudreau (24) took over the Tribe in 1942.

Wedge, who spent the prior two seasons as the manager of the Indians’ Triple-A affiliate in Buffalo, said he is taking a Clint Eastwood-type approach to his first big league job, especially after watching the Tribe jettison a lot of its high-priced talent the last two seasons.

“I was pretty much prepared for the good, the bad and the ugly,” Wedge said. “As a manager, you’ve got to be prepared for the very best and the very worst. But I expect our players to go out and perform.”

While Wedge said the nightly phone calls to Danvers have been replaced by a slew of w-mails from parks all over the American League, he still keeps abreast of what’s going on locally in the town that gave him his major league start.

Last night Wedge, the catcher-turned-entrepreneur-turned big league skipper, was more than happy to sit in the visiting dugout and gaze upon the field where he broke in for the Red Sox in 1991.

“This place will always be dear to my heart. I came up with the Red Sox; they gave me my first big league opportunity. There’s the relationships I made here, and I’ve sustained the ones that I’ve made in Danvers with Strike One. Every time I come back here it’s always going to be dear to me.”