“2 teams find managers” |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2010 02:25 PM PDT SEATTLE – Call it a tale of two teams naming managers: Northrop graduate Eric Wedge in Seattle and Mike Quade with the Cubs After a lengthy day of travel back to his home in Cleveland, Wedge had barely walked through his front door when his phone chimed. Seattle general manager Jack Zduriencik was on the line with a simple question: would you like to take on the rebuilding job waiting in Seattle? "Can I at least drop my bags?" Wedge asked. It wasn't long before Wedge was on his way back to the Pacific Northwest. On Tuesday, he was introduced as the newest manager of the Seattle Mariners. In Chicago, Quade had just been fishing in Florida when he found out he caught the big one. That, of course, was the Cubs' managing job. "The timing of it, it's comical," he said. Wedge pledged that accountability and respect will be the basis of trying to rebuild a franchise with a pair of 101-loss campaigns in the past three seasons. "I could write a master's thesis on what it means to respect the game and everything that goes along with that," Wedge said. "But that consistency in what we're going to show is going to allow them to come out and play it all the way through. "It doesn't matter how many people are in the stands, where we're playing, the time of the year, what the weather is like, what our record is, the way we play and our effort and the way we go about it is going to be there each and every day. ... Those are things that are going to happen here." In his seven years in Cleveland, Wedge successfully rebuilt the Indians beginning in 2003 and culminating with the 2007 season when Wedge was named AL manager of the year and took the Indians within one game of the World Series. Sporting a mustache that lends an air of maturity to the 42-year-old, Wedge becomes the seventh manager of the Mariners since the beginning of the 2003 season. The Cubs decided to keep Quade as their manager, choosing to go with the man who ran the team well for the last six weeks of last season rather than high-profile Hall of Famer and franchise icon Ryne Sandberg. Quade, Chicago's third base coach the past four years, was given a two-year contract Tuesday along with a club option for 2013. He served as interim manager after Lou Piniella abruptly stepped down in late August, leading the team to a 24-13 record, and he envisions the Cubs contending next year. The Cubs finished the season at 75-87, in next-to-last place in the NL Central and a far cry from what a team with a payroll of about $145 million had expected. "The way we played those last six weeks, why not?" Quade said. "I believe that from Day 1 – why not us? There are plenty of examples of teams that had rough years, finished strong – San Diego – and then built on it the next year." The job will be his first as a full-time major league manager. The hire is the first under new owner Tom Ricketts, who watched the Cubs finish out of the playoffs yet again. Chicago's infamous World Series championship drought now stands at 102 years. "We believe that Mike can coach, manage and win for the Chicago Cubs," Ricketts said. The 53-year-old Quade managed more than 2,300 minor league games in the Montreal, Philadelphia, Oakland and Cubs farm systems before arriving in Chicago. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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