Austin Hedges knows what you’re thinking. He’s just happy to be in the World Series with the Texas Rangers.
And he is, and there’s more to it than that. But even he walks around with just a bit of disbelief at all of this.
“To most people, including myself, it seems like a fictional thing, like the World Series is a fake place that some people get to go to but not you,” Hedges said Thursday on the eve of Game 1 of the World Series. “To think that I get to be a part of this, it’s just the coolest thing.”
The Rangers open the Fall Classic at 7:03 p.m. Friday night against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Globe Life Field.
Hedges didn’t join the Rangers until Aug. 1. He was the final move general manager Chris Young made at the trade deadline. He sent some international pool money to the Pittsburgh Pirates to acquire Hedges.
At the time, catcher Jonah Heim was hurt. Hedges, a light-hitting backstop with a great reputation for handling a staff and framing pitches, was considered insurance if Heim couldn’t return.
Heim came back on Aug. 13. The Rangers could have designated Hedges for assignment or even released him. Instead, they sent Sam Huff back to Triple-A and kept Hedges around.
He played in 16 games for the Rangers, helping Heim ease back into playing every day as he worked through the remnants of his left wrist tendon strain. He logged time late in games to give Heim and Mitch Garver a bit of a break.
Hedges hasn’t played this postseason, but he’s been ever present. He stands on the rail of the dugout and his personality and big smile stand out. His series-clinching locker room celebrations with pitcher Max Scherzer after both the AL Division Series and the AL Championship Series are the stuff of hilarity.
Plus, there’s the number on his butt, as Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said after winning the ALDS.
“The only thing I need to know right now,” Bochy asked, “Hedgie, what’s the number on your ass right now?”
Neither Bochy nor Hedges have been clear about the “number” is, but the assumption by many is that it’s likely a tally of Rangers wins needed to win a championship (13).
Hedges wants to play, just like anyone else. But the Rangers have a locked-in lineup, and he knew that when he arrived. But the veteran — he broke in with the San Diego Padres in 2015 — believes he has something offer a team through his attitude, something he calls “relaxed confidence.”
Oddly, it’s built on failure.
“I’ve failed a lot in this game, and in those failures, I’ve learned a lot and I feel like I have a pretty good awareness of the anxieties that come about through a game and they’re unique to everybody but they’re also the same,” Hedges said. “Everybody is basically going through the same thing in their own way and since that’s the case, it makes it easier for me when I’m not playing to realize that’s happening and then realize just how far a little positivity, a little reassurance, a little joke, can go.”
Hedges has been with the Rangers just three months and when he arrived he knew just one player — outfielder Travis Jankowski, whom he came up with in the Padres system.
Watch the team every day and you quickly see that Hedges has, in his own way, become indispensable, even if he’s not playing.
He now says he has “26-plus brothers.”
How does that happen? Belief.
“What they were doing was everything that I believed in and so it was easy,” Hedges said of his arrival in Texas. “I believed in everything that these guys are doing, how they go about their business. And I’m like, ‘I’m just gonna buy into that because I already believe in it.’”
That belief has the Rangers four wins away from a world title. And, somewhere, Hedges is keeping track.
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