It’s not a feeding frenzy yet, but blood is definitely in the water in Cleveland:
The fate of manager Eric Wedge is in the hands of owner Larry and team president Paul Dolan. If they say he’s gone, he’s gone . . . When asked if he was considering a change, Larry Dolan said, “I’ll talk to you later.” When asked if that meant a change was being considered, Dolan said, “I just don’t want to lie to you.”
Since then Paul Dolan said that nothing was imminent, and GM Mark Shapiro says he thinks that Wedge should keep his job. As the article says, though, it’s probably not Shapiro’s call.
I’m not one of those guys who thinks that firing a manager is necessarily the best solution -- in fact it rarely is -- but I can’t say I see any benefit to keeping Eric Wedge around. His defenders will cite all of the injuries the Indians have suffered, but (a) they were playing poorly right of the gate this season; and (b) even if they weren’t, injuries are a fact of life in baseball that just have to be overcome. Except Cleveland never overcomes them, and at some point someone has to be held responsible for that. Maybe that’s Mark Shapiro for not supplying the kind of depth an otherwise talented team needs in order to work through this stuff. There’s an order in which these things tend to proceed, however, and that usually involves the manager getting axed first.
Not that we’d be talking epic unfairness if Wedge were to get canned. He has has had seven years to make something work with this team, and with one near-magical exception, it hasn’t worked. Better managers than Eric Wedge have been let go after compiling shorter and less disappointing records. When you add in the observation by the great Terry Pluto that Wedge just looks lost and beat and demoralized these days, one can’t help but think that a change would do both him and the Indians some good.