I screwed up that pretty good, here’s a link to the THT article

Interesting. I never thought about Wedge’s youth and its potential implications for his managerial career.

Hall of Fame? Too early to tell, but put me in Wedge’s corner for now. He’s young, he’s still learning, and I like what the team did the 2nd half considering what he had to work with. In fact .500 this year without Hafner, Martinez, Westbrook, Carmona much or most of the year, and losing Sabathia (a Cy Young pitcher), Blake and Byrd. Plus, somehow he and his staff turned Lee into a Cy Young caliber pitcher.

So I don’t agree that he’s failed badly at making the most of his opportunities.

With 500 already, he should put up very nice totals if he just keeps having years like he’s had.

I assume all this “expectations” knocking goes away when he wins a ring.

This kind of demonstrates why total wins shouldn’t be valued as high as winning percentage and World Series won.

I’ll tell you an odd thing about Wedge is that his clubs have never won between 82 and 92 games.

A positive thing about Wedge is that after his rookie year, when he had a rookie-laden roster not built to win in that season, he’s never really had a bad club. In down years, the team is mediocre with 78-81 wins. In up years, the team has been among the best in the game with 93 and 96 wins.

I think maybe that means something. Maybe.

This is pretty lazy writing on Jaffe’s part. I think its fair to say that Wedge’s teams have fallen short of pre-season expectations twice in his six year career. While that’s more than we’d like to see, I don’t think that’s not the common definition of usually.

Furthermore, how effective of a test is it anyways? Lots of factors besides managerial skill play into whether a team fulfills its pre-season expectations. I realize analyzing managers is probably pretty difficult, but that doesn’t excuse lazy work.

Since the general consensus (on this site anyway) is that managers don’t matter (except that Wedge sometimes does stupid stuff we don’t like), I suggest we have a rotating manager of the year award – everyone gets a turn. Or, we could simply give an award either to the manager who succeeds in getting fired after the shortest tenure, or to the manager who is most successful in persuading his boss that he should be retained (Bobby Cox would have to be excluded on the grounds that it’s not fair).

I don’t see it happened, though. I don’t follow the Indians too closely, but that team usually does a little worse than expectations, which I take as a knock on the manager. An early start puts him in a good position, but he’s got to make the most of his opportunities. To date, he’s failed badly at that.
 
FE WEE