I also believe Wedge is naturally biased against hitters like Smoak and Ackley. I think Wedge would have judged Edgar as being too passive as well. Wedge's natural inclination is to support a hitter like Peguero and hope a little experience will ultimately shrink the zone a bit over time.
But, when you have two players whose primary "natural gift" is the ability to draw 100 walks a season, if you have an MLB manager who scoffs at the notion that OBP is actually important ... you have a pairing that is not likely to work well together.
I'll say it again: Wedge as a player was a .250/.350/.440 hitter. He walked A TON. His batting eye was great even though he struck out a fair bit (18% K rate). He was patient waiting for his pitches and then slammed them into gaps (40+% XBH rate with his low average). If he'd been in Oakland's system in the 2000s instead of Boston's in the early 90s, he would have had quite a decent ML career.
The idea that Wedge hates OBP when he was a .100 ISOW player is, to be blunt, ridiculous. What Doc said earlier I agree with: you can't go to the plate hoping for ball one. You go up there planning to get a hit and not swing at dumb pitches, and if you get a walk out of it you take it.
Wedge talked more about it tonight.
"What you can't do is play this game with fear. You have to go out there and play and when you get your first good pitch to take a whack at, you have to take a whack at it. People stress so much getting deeper in counts and drawing walks, it's almost a backward way of looking at it."
Wedge is not against walks or OBP, he's against scared, passive ballplayers who refuse to punish pitchers for mistakes because they're hoping the pitcher makes even MORE mistakes to allow them on base. Wedge was a Nick-Swisher type of player. Nick is an OBP and Moneyball/SABR-oriented player. Wedge is on the side of The Numbers (tm).
He's not on the side of players who won't control the zone and scare pitchers. In his mind you get walks because the pitcher is terrified to leave one in the middle of the plate for you, not because he can't throw a rock in the ocean and you don't have to do anything to make him that way. And I'm sure Ackley, when he gets back, will remember to both walk AND crush doubles into the gap, and make both us and Wedge happy.
~G