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!”
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Greg Wyshynski
Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh stated the obvious: The 6-2 humbling they suffered against the arch-rival Florida Panthers on Tuesday night was not how they wanted to begin the latest Battle of Florida.
“It’s definitely a salty feeling in here. We didn’t have a great start to this series like we talked about,” the veteran said. “But we know we can be better. We’ve got another level and we’ll find a way to get to that.”
The Panthers took a 1-0 series lead by scoring six times on 16 shots against Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy. After Sam Bennett and Jake Guentzel traded goals in the first period, the Panthers scored four straight times — including goals by Nate Schmidt and Matthew Tkachuk that were 14 seconds apart in the second period. Schmidt’s goal was unsuccessfully challenged for goalie interference by the Lightning, earning a delay of game penalty. Tkachuk scored on the ensuing power play to make it 4-1.
“Yeah, you’ve got to stop that bleeding,” defenseman Victor Hedman said. “We give up that third one. The challenge that didn’t go our way and we give up one right away. That’s tough, but we got to make sure it stops there and not give up the fifth one as well.”
Tkachuk, returning to the Florida lineup for the first time after being injured in February’s 4 Nations Face-Off, scored his second of the game on the power play at 9:44 of the second period to make it 5-1 for the Panthers, en route to the 6-2 rout.
“You see him being able to step into a game and be impactful,” Schmidt said of Tkachuk. “That’s who he is. He’s a playoff player.”
Lightning coach Jon Cooper, who has won two of the three Battle of Florida playoff series against the Panthers, appreciated his team’s effort despite the result.
“I love this team. They try. They’re always trying, and they did that again tonight. Sometimes the results aren’t there. Most nights they are,” he said. “We can sit here and dissect this game all we want. The bottom line is we lost. Whether you lose 6-2 or you lose 1-0 in overtime, we lost the game. Turn the page and move on. Let’s sit here in 48 hours or whatever it is and dissect that one. This one’s over.”
The Panthers are the reigning Stanley Cup champion. Cooper noted that a number of his players were seeing their first playoff action in Game 1.
“We had a bunch of guys tonight playing their first playoff games, and I thought guys handled it fairly well. But in the end we gave up six goals,” he said. “The series isn’t won in one game, so there’s a positive.”
That said, it took just one game for the Panthers to flex on the Lightning defense and special teams, going 3-for-3 on the power play. One huge factor in that domination was an injury to Lightning center Anthony Cirelli, their best defensive forward and a key to their penalty kill. He left the game after taking two shifts in the second period. There was no update on his status after the game.
Game 2 is Thursday night at Amalie Arena in Tampa.
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Jesse Rogers
CHICAGO — Catcher Miguel Amaya was confident he’d be jogging around the bases when he blasted a two-out, ninth-inning baseball high into the Wrigley Field sky with his Chicago Cubs trailing 10-9 to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Tuesday night.
He was right — but just barely.
Amaya’s 388-foot shot landed in the center field basket, sending the home crowd into a frenzy as Dodgers closer Tanner Scott blew the save. And one inning later, the Cubs won the game 11-10 on an Ian Happ run-scoring single off Noah Davis, capping yet another wild affair at Wrigley.
According to Statcast, Amaya’s blast would have been a home run in exactly one park in the majors.
“As a baseball player, its something you dream of,” Amaya said. “As soon as I hit, I felt it was out but then I saw the center fielder getting into position to catch it. Then it was, ‘Oh my god, I have to run,’ but it was enough to get out.
“I love those basket balls.”
It was the second time in five days that both teams playing at Wrigley scored 10 or more runs; on Friday, the Cubs beat the Diamondbacks 13-11 thanks to a six-run eighth inning that was preceded by a 10-run frame by Arizona.
On Tuesday, the Cubs led 5-3 after the first inning, but the Dodgers took a 10-7 lead thanks to a five-run seventh aided by an error from third baseman Gage Workman. As has been the case all month, the Cubs kept fighting back. Right fielder Kyle Tucker brought them within one with an eighth-inning home run before Amaya tied it in the ninth.
“They’ve done some amazing things and some resilient things, most importantly,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said of the team’s play on its homestand. “You win games like that early in the season and it’s a great carry forward for the rest of the season.”
The Cubs improved to 15-10 thanks to a high-powered offense that leads the league in scoring at just over six runs per game. They’ve tallied 10 or more runs in seven games already, their most through 25 games of a season since 1895, according to ESPN Research. No other team this season has done it more than 3 times.
Counsell credited his bullpen in shutting down the Dodgers in the final few innings.
The Cubs also did well facing Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani. He went 0 for 4, lowering his batting average against them this year to .167. Against all other teams, he’s hitting .302.
He also went 0-for-3 against Shota Imanaga and is now 0-for-10 against the Cubs starter.
“The next 10 at-bats he might get 10 hits,” Imanaga said. “It’s been a small miracle that it’s happened 10 times in a row.”
The Cubs keep on performing miracles at the plate both in the colder conditions this month and in the few games where the weather has been favorable for hitters. That included Tuesday, when it was 71 degrees with the wind blowing out at first pitch. It led to six home runs, none bigger than Amaya’s.
“Basket hurt us a couple times last year,” Counsell said with a smirk. “It was helpful tonight.”
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