IS ERIC WEDGE MLB'S BILL BELICHICK?

by Scott Sargent, Waiting For Next Year

Football is the only sport that forces you to list your players' respective health issues days in advance of the coin toss. Thursday afternoon rolls around, and you can just hear the stream of reports coming out of the practice field of each NFL team. Running back knees, quarterback fingers; you name it, it's on there.

But in baseball, you can option. You can recall. Heck, you can just play your guys every day even though they're experiencing some sort of nagging injury. But will you win? Not likely.

No team is more known for deceiving injury reports than the New England Patriots. Listing half of a roster as "probable" is not out of the question. Tom Brady, "questionable?" Then he'll come out and toss 400 yards and five touchdowns.

Enter Eric Wedge.

Today, the catcher for the Cleveland Indians, Victor Martinez, was added to the Tribe's 15-day disabled list with an inflamed elbow that occurred during an at-bat in Wednesday's game. Or did it? Per the team's official site:

After the game, manager Eric Wedge revealed that the elbow had flared up on
Martinez during the at-bat and that the catcher has been battling the elbow
problem all season.

Wait. All season? You mean that could be why a clean-up hitter has zero home runs through mid-June? Who would've thought...

How about Joe Borowski? The team's closer comes out of spring training topping out in the mid-80s. He can't locate, and when he does, he gets raked all over the yard. He winds up with an ERA near 15, but he's fine. At least until he gives up a loss to the Red Sox. Then he heads to the DL for several weeks with what was called a "nagging triceps injury."

Travis Hafner? The power-hitting DH? He struggled all season long, yet we were told he was perfectly healthy. Then out of nowhere comes a shoulder injury severe enough to land him on the disabled list. So bad that he was supposed to start rehab a week ago and still has not hit a live pitch.

It's one thing for Belichick to be deceptive as he does not want the other team to be able to expect the total package. But it's another for Wedge to be deceptive to the team's fans and the local media. A backlash was starting to bubble up around two weeks ago when we found out that Martinez had still not recovered from the hamstring injury that occurred during opening day. Yet he was trotted out there each game, crouching behind the plate and doing next to nothing when standing next to it with a bat in his hand.

Credibility obviously isn't something that Wedge is oozing these days. Belichick gets respected for his actions because, as Eric Cartman told us, he wins games. Perhaps if the Indians were above .500, Tribe fans would think differently.