Bill Livingston notes that Wedge’s loyalty to his players once hurt his image, but now it’s helping him win in the playoffs:

No sport is as filled with numbers as baseball, but the Indians have won with qualities you can’t touch, time or test objectively. On a hot afternoon two years ago, when a playoff spot that seemed certain was slipping away, manager Eric Wedge said, “Belief in your players is the most important thing.”
It seemed to be proof of his minor-league pedigree. He was a developer, not a finisher.
In Game 4 of the previous series, a fan base that had forgotten about Bartolo Colon losing to the Red Sox by a preposterous score of 23-7 on short rest in 1999 wanted hard-throwing C.C. Sabathia on the mound in Yankee Stadium, not the subtler and slower example of the pitcher’s craft that Byrd exemplifies. Byrd would never have gotten off a lot of armchair managers’ benches. Wedge saw it differently.
“The whole world wanted C.C. out on the mound, everybody but my mom, Eric Wedge, and my wife,” Byrd said. “I’ve always appreciated Eric’s loyalty. It’s not me to try to prove everybody wrong. I’d rather prove a few people right. He was one of them. You really start to get the most out of your players when you have that kind of atmosphere.”

And Eric isn’t so loyal that he wasn’t willing to pull Byrd the second he got in trouble. Wedge knew Byrd tended to get hit once he got above sixty pitches in a game and had a reliever ready to go when Paul allowed back to back home runs after throwing sixty four pitches. A very good job by Wedge last night.

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