Game 4 Starter Wright Gives Himself an ‘F’

Indian Manager Mike Hargrove was so concerned about the wear and tear on rookie pitcher Jaret Wright’s arm that he pushed the right-hander back in his World Series rotation so he’d have only one start, in Game 4 tonight.

Wright has thrown a combined 210 innings between double-A Akron, triple-A Buffalo and Cleveland, more than he has in any other season, and Hargrove said he wasn’t sure “how much Jaret Wright has left in his tank.”

Wright, though, provided a definitive answer Tuesday when asked about his fuel gauge.

“Are the Marlins going to see this?” Wright asked. “It is full, very full.”

It may have been too full in his last start, against Baltimore in Game 4 of the American League championship series on Oct. 12. Wright, working with an extra day’s rest, gave up five runs and six hits in three innings in an 8-7 Cleveland victory, and he said he might have been overthrowing a bit.

“It was a bad start, and I guess if I was going to have one, that was probably a good time to get it out of the way,” said Wright, who at 21 will be the youngest pitcher to start a World Series game since Kansas City’s Bret Saberhagen in 1985. “Hopefully I can come back strong [tonight].”

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Hargrove, a former major league infielder, was asked what it was like to hit a slider off the fingertips on a cold night such as Tuesday.

“It hurts, and it’s just not a lot of fun,” he said. “Hitting it off the end of the bat is probably worse than hitting the ball down by your hands. It’s very painful, and it stays painful for a while.

“And it’s the kind of hurt that when it stops hurting, it feels so good that it stopped that it was worth getting hurt in the first place.”