Stop the search! Tribe picks Manny

So, Manny Acta, eh?

I can't disagree too much with general manager Mark Shapiro's decision, which the Indians announced today. I wanted someone who was an outsider, a strong voice with a different perspective, to manage the Indians. Acta sounds like that voice.

"We are very excited to have Manny Acta as our Major League manager,” Shapiro said in a press release. “After speaking with an impressive array of candidates, we feel that Manny is a very strong and experienced leader who possesses great energy and enthusiasm along with tremendous communication skills and a positive mindset that will command a presence in the dugout, clubhouse and with our fans.”

Seems like a nice choice, right?

Acta might be, too. He would not, however, have been my choice; I preferred Bobby Valentine, a less-risky hire. But I'll have to defer to Shapiro on who was the best fit for the ballclub he's trying to remake.

In picking Acta, Shapiro brought in a respected teacher who is bilingual and comfortable with a bad organization.

I do wish Acta, 40, had a record of success on his managerial resume. I mean, what he did with the Nationals doesn't suggest he's the next Walter Alston or Sparky Anderson. But under the circumstances -- and the circumstances in D.C. were dire -- Acta did about as well as anybody else could have done. A bad organization needs miracles to succeed, and miracles don't fall out of the baseball tree too often.

Now, the question is this: Is Acta trading one bad organization for another?

He won't be inheriting a team deep in talent. The Indians are short of top-shelf pitching, have a bullpen in disrepair and lack speed. At times last season, they displayed the fundamental soundness of a Little League team, which is an indictment of fired manager Eric Wedge.

Not sure if the Nats were the symbol of a fundamentally-sound team, because I didn't see much of them. Why would I? If baseball fans in D.C. didn't bother with them, I had no reason to watch them either.

But the shipwreck that was the 2009 Nats is behind Acta. What is ahead of him is hard to tell, the obvious shortcomings of the Indians notwithstanding. Yet if he thought he was inheriting a pennant contender, he is sadly mistaken.

He's coming into a rebuilding project, a job that might be worst than what he left. It won't be a quick turnaround either. The job will test Acta's patience, as it will tests the patience of the hungry-for-a-winner Tribe faithful.

For now, fans know who will be at the helm of this team. It will be run by a man in Acta, who reportedly turned down the Astros job, with experience and the ability to communicate. The team will also be run by someone who can bring a fresh eye to it all.

That's what Shapiro needed for the organization: an outsider. The question he can't answer now is did he pick the "right" outsider.

Will Valentine's day come early for Indians?

I don’t know much about Manny Acta – as a person or as a Major League manager. I’ve never interviewed Acta; never seen the man either. What I do know about him is the managed one of the worst teams in baseball last season. Now, managing the Nationals isn’t a fate the baseball gods should put in any decent man’s hands. The Nats are a hopeless lot in a league with other going-nowhere organizations like the Padres and the Pirates. Acta could have been Walter Alston, Connie Mack, Casey Stengel and Sparky Anderson rolled into one, and he still wouldn’t have been able to turn the Nats into a winner. He might develop into a Sparky-like manager -- someday. Yet I find it curious that Indians GM Mark Shapiro (and team president Paul Dolan) has kept Acta, 40, on a short list of candidates to replace Eric Wedge. Aside from being a Latino and bilingual, two plusses in baseball, Acta brings little else. In my opinion, he's a gamble. But managing in the Major Leagues isn't like playing roulette in Vegas, so Shapiro should go for a manager whose resume looks a bit more substantial than Acta’s. I saw that candidate on Shapiro's initial list: Mike Hargrove. And maybe if the Astros can think about rehiring Phil Garner, the Indians could have brought Hargrove back. He certainly knew the organization and Cleveland, a city where he played and managed. If Hargrove, 60, had rekindled the passion inside, I would have welcomed the man back. Hargrove, however, wouldn’t have been my first choice anyway. Shapiro has been looking at another candidate as seasoned as Hargrove in Bobby Valentine, a man fresh from managing in Japan. Valentine, 59, has never lost his passion. When the Mets fired him in 2002, Valentine chased managerial openings elsewhere. Nobody rush to hire him, despite the fact he had won with the Rangers and with the Mets. His only opportunity came with the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan, and Valentine took it. He’s back from Japan now; he’s ready for another go at the bigs. Shapiro should give it to him. He should pick Valentine because he’s an experienced outsider, someone who can judge the ballclub without appearing to be, as Wedge did, Shapiro’s footman. The organization seems to have enough Shapiro lackeys in the front office to last it a decade. He won’t be hiring a lackey in the frank-talking Valentine, whose enthusiastic candor might not keep him on Shapiro’s list. Still, Valentine's glibness would be a wonderful change, though, from the reticence Wedge showed he favors. In Shapiro's delusional world, the Indians are a ballplayer here or there from being a contending club. The organization is filled with players with high ceilings – talent that just needs to be nurtured. To him, bad isn’t as bad as it seems; just disregard the fact the Tribe finished light-years away from .500 last season. Shapiro won’t be able to sell Valentine this fiction. Valentine won’t let him. He also won’t let his players dodge responsibility – to the team, to the community and to the media. Keep in mind that Shapiro isn’t necessarily going to pick a manager who will warm to the media; he’ll pick a manager who can lead an inexperienced and rebuilding ballclub. The fact his choice might be able to curry favor with the media could be a bonus. What he needs is somebody who isn’t inexperienced like Dodgers bench coach Don Mattingly, a rumored candidate. If Shapiro's choice happens to be Mattingly or Valentine or Acta, the Indians will be better for it. The organization (and its flaws) will certainly be more transparent than it ever was during the Wedge years.

Tribe needs to follow the Twins model

I watched Tuesday night as the Minnesota Twins celebrated another division championship, a routine occurrence for this small-market powerhouse. In Game 163 of the ’09 season, they wrote a sad ending to what had been a feel-good story about the Detroit Tigers, a team that had invigorated a city whose can-do spirit had been battered.

Yet as I looked at Joe Mauer, Nick Punto, Joe Nathan and manager Ron Gardenhire jump up and down inside the Metrodome like little boys, I was struck by how much a team run on a shoestring can accomplish if it makes wise decisions. Seeing what the Twins had just done, I was reminded of what a disappointment the Indians have been.

In a city with a fan base that had proved long ago it would support a competitive ballclub, the Indians and their front office have given their fans one season after another of mostly mediocrity.

For instead of playing for division titles like the Twins, the Tribe has been playing to stay ahead of the Royals for the Central Division cellar. Such lousy performances don’t pack a ballpark or engender pride in a team, which explains the empty seats in June, July, August and September.

But why have the Indians, a 65-97 team with more resources than the Twins, been consistently mediocre and boring?

I think that’s a question the Dolan family, which owns the franchise, needs to answer. No doubt, the Dolans made a smart move in ridding the team of manager Eric Wedge. While it would be a mistake to question his integrity or his knowledge of baseball, Wedge never came across as much of a teacher, and for an organization that banks its future on young talent, a manager who can teach is essential to success.

That’s one of the differences between the Indians and the Twins, who may well not advance beyond the first round of the playoffs. But in "Gardy," they have a manager who will ensure the team plays smartly. A man who enjoys the teaching part of baseball, he’s been able to take young talent and mold it into quality Major Leaguers. Go up and down the team’s roster, and you will find players that benefited from Gardenhire’s tutoring.

Wedge always talked about playing “the game the right way,” but nothing his teams did showed his players had a grasp of what “the right way” was. His players were woefully weak defensively, made blunders on the bases, never learned to bunt, lacked speed and, though they hustled, didn’t play with a carefree air. They were a passionless bunch, playing the game as uptight as the colorless Wedge often looked.

I can’t blame Wedge, however, for all that went wrong with the Indians this season, because he might have done a better job had general manager Mark Shapiro given him better talent to mold.

Under Shapiro, the Tribe hasn’t hit with one of its top draft picks, a fact that points to an inability to judge talent and not necessarily to a bad manager.

A team wins with talent, and except for a couple of trades and a handful of low-round draft picks who have done well, Shapiro hasn’t stocked the cupboard, which makes success problematic for whomever he hires to succeed Wedge.

The next manager will stand as a referendum on Shapiro and on the bold promises he made years ago about winning championships.

His promises seem so hollow when you examine what the Twins have done in the past decade. They compete year after year even though their revenue streams flow at a trickle compared with the money Shapiro has to work with.

I hope Shapiro watched the game Tuesday. He can learn lessons from what he saw. He should remember that it’s not about how much a small-market team like the Indians spend; it’s about their ability to get the max out of the minimum.

The Twins do that well, which is why they have found their way into contention for division titles throughout the decade. While they might not be the Yankees or the Red Sox, the Twins aren’t the Indians either, which fans in Twin Cities can be thankful for as baseball continues there deep into October.

Is Tribe prepping for 2011 or '12? Yep ...

Come mid-October, you won’t hear general manager Mark Shapiro talk about how well the Indians played the final month of the '09 season. For Shapiro will have bigger issues ahead to confront than trying to put a smiley face on the dismal past: He needs a new manager.

In a decision Wednesday that surprised nobody, he didn't dismiss or release or bid adieu to manager Eric Wedge; no, Shapiro fired Wedge. No reason to use euphemisms here to soften it, because Shapiro just did what he should have done awhile ago.

With the Wedge era closed, the cliches about "lessons learned" can follow him out the clubhouse door. Who wants to hear those words anymore? Besides, what lessons do players learn from loss after loss?

It might have been a different matter if those September losses were tied to solid baseball, but it’s an altogether different tale when the '09 season speeds toward its final weekend and not much points to lessons learned.

The Indians were a lousy baseball team when Wedge opened the season, and they are a lousy baseball team as he plays out the season as a lame duck. In fact, the team he is passing on to somebody else looks worse now than it did on Opening Day.

Nothing illustrates that fact any better than the team's performance on the last road trip to Minneapolis and Oakland, where the Tribe played seven games and won none. Their return home didn't improve their play.

They have had an inning here or there in which they looked decent, but they also have had a couple of ballgames in which they kicked the baseball around as if they were playing soccer. Their pitching and hitting proved spotty; their overall demeanor reflected a team without a pulse, particularly the play from some of the talent Shapiro acquired through trades.

He'll be counting on these men to be the cornerstones of the team’s future, and if they are, the future doesn’t look promising – at least in the near term. Only the most optimistic fan can see his Indians contending for anything in 2010, aside from the No. 1 overall pick in 2011.

All next season will be about rebuilding, which fans in Cleveland have tired of. They’ve seen what rebuilding has brought..

In embarking on the last rebuilding project in 2002, Shapiro and Wedge promised championships. Instead, they delivered season after season of uneven performances and not one championship.

None of the other seasons, however, went as badly as this one. It offers no hope of better things to come soon, because the season exposed too many flaws in a roster that has too many players whose “ceilings” might be high, as Shapiro puts it, but whose performances have been suspect.

As 2009 limps to its conclusion, Indians fans see a team that mirrors the Royals, the Padres, the Pirates and the Nationals, ballclubs that head into the offseason with no more hope for 2010 than the Tribe.

All have talent at various places; all have flaws in most places. While the Indians might have fewer holes to fill, their holes are deeper than the western Pacific's Marianas Trench, as series after series in September showed.

Some nights, starting pitching betrayed them (Jeremy Sowers, Fausto Carmona and Justin Masterson); other times, it was the bullpen (Jess Todd, Jesse Veras and Rafael Perez). On still other nights, the hitting (Niuman Romero, Trevor Crowe and Kelly Shoppach) didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. And don’t bother to mention games in which the defense disappeared (Andy Marte and Jhonny Peralta, etc).

Sorry pitching, a lack of timely hitting, a mediocre manager and a leaky defense: call it the Grand Slam of baseball futility.

And that’s what worries Indians fans, who wonder aloud what Shapiro can do to quickly reverse the team’s misfortunes. Firing Wedge was a step toward better days.

A new manager should help, but it doesn't address a shortage of talent. Shapiro needs to find some. He can begin with starting pitching, where he has no one to anchor the rotation. His bullpen seems fairly settled, as settled as a bullpen can be from one season to the next.

The offense is as big a question mark as the starting pitching.

Peralta, Travis Hafner and Grady Sizemore, now injured, will have to play like real stars. Shin-Soo Choo will need to continue his development, as will Asdrubal Cabrera. He might be the brightest star in the horizon.

How the other pieces fit around these cornerstones will be what decides whether 2010 will be a prelude to better days in 2011 or '12. Under the best of circumstances, the team could be .500 next season. But .500 won’t do much to assuage diehard fans that demand a lot more.

Shapiro heeded one of their demands. He won't allow them to worry about losing games because their Indians have a second-rate manager in the dugout.

(Photo of fireworks at Progressive Field by 1blessedmon)