Local author pens book with former major league catcher

Doug Wedge is an attorney, but his first love is writing. His second love just might be baseball.

Let’s amend that. His first love must be his wife, Shawn, if for no other reason — and I’m sure there are others —than that his brother-in-law is Charlie O’Brien. And that familial connection has led to the 40-year-old Mountain Brook resident’s rookie offering as an author, The Cy Young Catcher, in bookstores this month. 

O’Brien’s name might not jump to mind for casual baseball fans, but it certainly does for Braves fans and diamond aficionados. O’Brien spent 15 years in the major leagues, playing for eight different teams, two of those with the Atlanta Braves. He was on the 1994 and 1995 teams — the ’95 team was the Braves’ only World Series championship team in Atlanta.

But O’Brien’s claim to fame — and the reason he and Wedge collaborated on the book — is that in his long career as a backup catcher he called pitches for 13 different Cy Young winners, some of the most famous pitchers of the era. The Cy Young is given to the best pitcher in each league after each season.

The list? Braves Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Steve Bedrosian; Roger Clemens, Frank Viola, David Cone, Pat Hentgen, Jack McDowell, Dwight Gooden, Bret Saberhagen, Pete Vuckovich and Chris Carpenter. Three of those he caught during their Cy Young seasons — Maddux, Hentgen and Clemens. He caught those three for four Young winners in a row (Maddux ’94-’95, Hentgen ’96 and Clemens ’97). 

It was Wedge’s idea for the book after his brother-in-law had mentioned the number of award winners he’d caught. 

“Around Christmas about four years ago, I said to him, ‘No one else has done this, what do you think about doing a book?’” Wedge said. “And he said, ‘OK, let’s give it a shot.’”

Wedge had been an English major at Tulsa University before going to law school and had several short stories published. But this was a step up into major league nonfiction.

He started with research of the pitchers and interviewed O’Brien some 20-25 times over a period of three years, Wedge said. As he started writing it, he admitted it was “dry — like a lawyer was writing it” — and he hit on the idea of having a chapter about each pitcher and leading the chapter off with the pitchers’ recollections of working with O’Brien. He started with Greg Maddux, and he interviewed the Hall of Famer. He was pleased with how much Maddux — and ultimately all of the pitchers — shared about working with O’Brien. 

It helped that O’Brien was highly respected by the pitchers he worked with. For some, like Maddux, Hentgen and Gooden, he was their “personal catcher,” meaning that they regularly worked games together and the usual starting catcher got the day off. Usually, that was because a pitcher had a certain rapport with O’Brien.

 “He had lots of credibility,” Wedge said. “The pitchers added an interesting element, talking about what it was like working with him. It helped because there were things Charlie was fuzzy about that they recalled.”

The book isn’t a transcript, Wedge said, even though it’s written in first person. He took what O’Brien told him in the interviews and “crafted it like a story. The goal is I wanted to capture his voice. It took maybe seven drafts.”

There’s enough “inside baseball” to please hard-core fans and, a word to the wise, since this is in a professional athlete’s voice, it is not a G-rated read. 

Wedge wrote the pitchers’ prefaces to each chapter. He interviewed 12 of the 13 in person or on the phone. Vuckovich was interviewed by email.

A sampling from the chapter on Greg Maddux:

“The biggest thing Charlie did was his set up was relaxed and calm. There was not a lot of jerky movement in his glove. He didn’t drop. His ass wasn’t higher on breaking balls and lower on fastballs, like you see a lot of catchers. He set up consistently. He wasn’t outer half on one fastball and two inches off on the next one – he was always in that perfect spot.”

There are also interesting takes on Clemens, for whom he testified in the steroids trial. For longtime Braves fans, there’s a Bob Didier anecdote, and for Barons fans, there’s McDowell and also an anecdote about Don Heinkel, now Dr. Don Heinkel, who lives and practices in Oneonta. 

By 2014, Wedge was ready to shop the book around, and there were rejections. But it found a home with Texas A&M University Press, which has a “Spirit of Sport” series. The 208-page book with some 15 color photos was set to be released March 22, and early plans were that it would be available at Little Professor as well as online.

One book signing is already scheduled. O’Brien and Wedge will be signing copies at a Birmingham Barons game May 1, and O’Brien will do the honors of tossing out the first pitch of that game.

You’d have to guess he’d call his own pitch on that one.