The most important .186 hitter in the majors? Why everybody loves Austin Hedges
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Tim Kurkjian
It is 8 o’clock on a February morning in the Cleveland Guardians clubhouse, and Austin Hedges is, as he often is, shirtless, which always amused one of his managers, Terry Francona, because, as the 65-year-old skipper put it, “with his shirt off, he looks like me.” Hedges is, as always, talking, teaching and laughing, as are his teammates, though it’s hard to imagine a group ever laughing harder than after Game 1 of the 2023 World Series, when the Texas Rangers’ Adolis Garcia hit a walk-off home run, while Hedges, in the hole at the time, celebrated wildly — inspiring an Instagram meme with what Hedges might have been thinking at that moment: Great, I don’t have to hit!
“It was hilarious … it wasn’t very nice, but it was hilarious,” Hedges said. “Look, I wanted that at-bat that night, but we’d just won on a walk-off homer. It was one of the greatest games that I’d ever been a part of.”
Said Rangers manager Bruce Bochy: “He’s the best. He takes the game seriously. He doesn’t take himself too seriously.”
That is one reason the Guardians’ Austin Hedges, 32, is the best backup catcher in baseball, the most important lifetime .186 hitter in the major leagues and one of the best leaders in the game. Including that 2023 World Series title, his teams have made appearances in three straight postseasons and four of the past five. It is rare that a backup catcher can be so instrumental to the success of a team, but Hedges is indeed a rare person. He has been described by teammates, always with love, as a character, a gym rat, a defensive weapon, a future manager, a relentless energy force, a tenacious talker, smart, involved, an idiot and an eccentric.
“He is all of those things, and I love him, and I’m not the only one,” said Francona, Hedges’ manager for three seasons in Cleveland who is now the skipper of the Cincinnati Reds. “He’s legit in the way he impacts a game and a team. When [Cleveland] had him in 2020 to ’22, we won, then he left, and we didn’t win, that was no coincidence. We missed him badly. And, now they brought him back.”
Current Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said he couldn’t be happier about that.
“He’s also one of the best teammates I’ve ever [been around] in my career,” Vogt said. “Every day, he attacks with energy. He’s 100% Austin every day. And he’s one of the best defensive catchers the last 10 to 15 years.”
Bochy said he misses Hedges.
“He brought talent, especially the way he handled the pitchers, he was a great complement to [Jonah] Heim [the everyday catcher],” Bochy said. “He also did a terrific job in bringing levity to our meetings. He is so good at making everyone else better. He is so self-deprecating. He loves to talk; he really loves to talk.”
Teammate David Fry said, smiling, “Man, I try to keep him in check, but I can’t. His energy is amazing, and it’s not fake. People listen when he talks. But, sometimes, I’ve told him, ‘You have to stop talking now.'”
San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Chapman called his childhood friend, “the biggest little kid you have ever seen.”
Hedges laughed at all the comments.
An idiot?
“That’s about right,” he said.
Biggest little kid?
“True,” he said.
Talks too much?
“I tell all my teammates,” Hedges said, “that it’s OK to tell me to shut the hell up. I’m responsive to that.”
But when a real compliment comes his way, Hedges is flattered and appreciative.
One of the best defensive catchers in the game the last 10 to 15 years?
“Those are some of the nicest words ever, especially coming from our manager, who was a catcher,” Hedges said. “That’s what keeps me in the game. If I don’t perform at an elite level, I’m looking for a job.”
Best backup catcher in the game?
“It’s a huge compliment,” he said. “That’s what I want to be. I want to play for another 10 years. I want to be a starter, but if I haven’t been able to help the team offensively, I have accepted the role. I love the role. I love the little things that I get to do that don’t require playing. It’s a lot of stress off my plate. I want to make sure that Bo Naylor is the best catcher in baseball. If I’m doing my job right, helping him every day, I think he should be.”
Hedges was a star player as a kid in Orange County, California, playing for his father, Charlie. He played on the same little league teams as several future major leaguers, including Chapman and San Diego Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove.
“We never lost a game,” Hedges said. “Until I won the World Series a couple of years ago, I would tell my dad, ‘It was like God gave me too many wins when I was a kid, now you’re going to lose in the big leagues.'”
Hedges wasn’t a backup back then.
“We took family road trips together, he was talking all the time when he was 8 years old,” Chapman said, smiling. “He was the best player on our team. I wasn’t better than him until senior year in high school.”
Hedges said, laughing, “I tell him all the time that I was much better than him growing up. Then he went to Cal State Fullerton, everything clicked, and now he makes $30 million a year. And I peaked in high school.”
But the signature smile, the effervescent personality and the merciless energy Hedges had in high school, and still has now, weren’t nearly as prominent after he was drafted by the Padres in the second round in 2011.
“From the minor leagues into probably three years into the big leagues, it was so stressful for me,” Hedges said. “Your whole life, all you want is to make it to pro ball, make it to the big leagues, and once I got there, it was so stressful and so overwhelming to have to actually perform. Money is on the line. If I don’t perform, I’m not going to have this job. So much stress.
“Especially 2018, in San Diego, it was the hardest mental battle of my whole life. I didn’t love baseball anymore. ‘I don’t know if I can do this. Can I handle this stress every day? It’s May, we’ve got 140 games left, can I really show up every day and deal with this stress?’ You’d get to the field at 1 o’clock with a lot of energy. But how does this last through 11 p.m.?”
Then he was dealt to Cleveland before the 2020 season.
“Getting traded to Cleveland was my fresh start,” Hedges said. “They do such an incredible job there with culture. But you have to look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not going to be the guy that hits .300 with 40 homers every year, [a] perennial All-Star.’ I have to find a way to stay in this game. If it’s not going to be offensively, I can do things defensively. I know I have always had an impact on the pitchers. When I became a backup catcher [in 2023], and I’m playing once a series, what type of impact am I bringing to the game? I read plenty of books, talked to plenty of people. I figured out for myself what works. The thing that stood out was relentless positive energy on a daily basis regardless of how it was going.”
Even when he wasn’t hitting.
“The blessing and curse to me was not hitting well,” Hedges said. “If I went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts again, and I still have a smile on my face, then you can, too. It’s not like Hedgy is always happy because he rakes; it’s like Hedgy is the best right now because he hasn’t got a hit in a week and he’s still going to show up for the boys to try to do anything he can to help them perform. That’s what I try to do every day.”
It helped playing for Bochy in Texas. And for Francona and now Vogt in Cleveland.
“Vogter, Tito and Boch, they are three completely different people, but they have one thing in common: a leader of men,” Hedges said. “When they talk, it’s concise. What they say, you might have heard it before. It might not be profound. But people listen to them.”
And now, everyone in the Guardians clubhouse listens to Hedges. He said he wants to play 10 more years. He said he has considered managing someday, but managers delegate — he wants to teach the game.
“I’ve decided I want to be a lifer in baseball, whatever that means,” Hedges said. “I want to put a jersey on. Baseball pants and a jersey in a big league clubhouse. It’s the greatest honor you could ever have. When I’m done playing, if I could [still be in the big leagues], I would feel like the luckiest man alive.”
The luckiest man alive was in the lineup for the Guardians’ first game of spring training. As a DH.
Hedges, self-deprecating as always, laughed and said, “Got to keep that bat in the lineup!”
NASCAR driver Katherine Legge said she has been receiving “hate mail” and “death threats” from auto racing fans after she was involved in a crash that collected veteran driver Kasey Kahne during the Xfinity Series race last weekend at Rockingham.
Legge, who has started four Indy 500s but is a relative novice in stock cars, added during Tuesday’s episode of her “Throttle Therapy” podcast that “the inappropriate social media comments I’ve received aren’t just disturbing, they are unacceptable.”
“Let me be very clear,” the British driver said, “I’m here to race and I’m here to compete, and I won’t tolerate any of these threats to my safety or to my dignity, whether that’s on track or off of it.”
Legge became the first woman in seven years to start a Cup Series race earlier this year at Phoenix. But her debut in NASCAR’s top series ended when Legge, who had already spun once, was involved in another spin and collected Daniel Suarez.
Her next start was the lower-level Xfinity race in Rockingham, North Carolina, last Saturday. Legge was good enough to make the field on speed but was bumped off the starting grid because of ownership points. Ultimately, she was able to take J.J. Yeley’s seat in the No. 53 car for Joey Gase Motorsports, which had to scramble at the last minute to prepare the car for her.
Legge was well off the pace as the leaders were lapping her, and when she entered Turn 1, William Sawalich got into the back of her car. That sent Legge spinning, and Kahne had nowhere to go, running into her along the bottom of the track.
“I gave [Sawalich] a lane and the reason the closing pace looks so high isn’t because I braked midcorner. I didn’t. I stayed on my line, stayed doing my speed, which obviously isn’t the speed of the leaders because they’re passing me,” Legge said. “He charged in a bit too hard, which is the speed difference you see. He understeered up a lane and into me, which spun me around.”
The 44-year-old Legge has experience in a variety of cars across numerous series. She made seven IndyCar starts for Dale Coyne Racing last year, and she has raced for several teams over more than a decade in the IMSA SportsCar series.
She has dabbled in NASCAR in the past, too, starting four Xfinity races during the 2018 season and another two years ago.
“I have earned my seat on that race track,” Legge said. “I’ve worked just as hard as any of the other drivers out there, and I’ve been racing professionally for the last 20 years. I’m 100 percent sure that … the teams that employed me — without me bringing any sponsorship money for the majority of those 20 years — did not do so as a DEI hire, or a gimmick, or anything else. It’s because I can drive a race car.”
Legge believes the vitriol she has received on social media is indicative of a larger issue with women in motorsports.
“Luckily,” she said, “I have been in tougher battles than you guys in the comment sections.”
Legge has received plenty of support from those in the racing community. IndyCar driver Marco Andretti clapped back at one critic on social media who called Legge “unproven” in response to a post about her history at the Indy 500.
“It’s wild to me how many grown men talk badly about badass girls like this,” Andretti wrote on X. “Does it make them feel more manly from the couch or something?”
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