It seemed inevitable that somebody would be held accountable for the Indians’ collapse in a season built on promise.

How much longer does the genius Clint Hurdle have?

When does the GM take the fall?

Sucks that Lou Brown turned them down, but he did have an order of whitewalls on the other line.

How much longer does the genius Clint Hurdle have?

Pirate president Coonelly has said Hurdle, plus the GM, Farm Director, and Scouting Director, will return in 2013.

Why do this now? You can't wait a week?

Presumably the last time Acta will be a manager. OK, I suppose it's possible he'll become an interim after being 3rd base coach for some manager who gets the ax. But nobody will ever hire him again for a full season.

I was hoping this was Roberto Alomar. Sandys cool too though.

Acta reportedly chose Cleveland over Houston a few years ago, which I thought was a mistake. As an Astros lifer, he probably would have had a much longer leash in Houston than he ended up having in Cleveland.

Doubt it. New Ownership almost always want to bring in their own men.

2 - He kind of did after the 2010 season. Shapiro was fired, per se, he was just kicked upstairs to a role where he wasn't making decisions anymore.

Castrovince says the Indians should just name Sandy the full-time manager: http://castrovince.mlblogs.com/2012/09/27/the-change-was-made-uptown/

Due diligence and all that, but I think that's the direction this is headed and I'm okay with that. Otherwise why deal with the headache of naming a fan favorite interim manager then hiring someone else who is going to be a nobody to most fans? Seems like they could've just waited and avoided that.

Why do this now? You can't wait a week?

Well, it's just before a season-ending six game homestand, so why not make some noise and get fan favorite Sandy Alomar in the manager seat and fill the stadium a bit.

12 is a valid point. Plus I think there are advantages to letting it be clear before the end of the season that there is an opening. You get the earliest attention from prospective candidates.

Plus, like Nats fans were by the end, maybe Indians fans are just sick of Manny's stupid face.

I guess if you're going to fire him anyway, it doesn't matter when it happens, but the Indians have been playing pretty well (or at least pretty hard) this month after a dreadful summer.

There were many reasons for the Indians to "quit" after going 5-24 in August, but they're still going out there and battling through 12-inning games against the Twins, then taking 2 of 3 in a tight series with the White Sox. (This Tiger fan was very thankful!)

Acta could get some credit for keeping the guys motivated, but I suppose it's not enough to save his job.

Presumably the last time Acta will be a manager. OK, I suppose it's possible he'll become an interim after being 3rd base coach for some manager who gets the ax. But nobody will ever hire him again for a full season.

It won't be easy, but he may get another shot. People said good about Manny before he was hired in DC. Perhaps that opinion lingers, or can be re-established. Joe Torre didn't start working on his HoF managerial credentials until his 4th job. It's not like Acta failed with a good team.

I agree with #16. More than anything, Manny seems like a cautionary tale when it comes to the risks of taking any managing job that's offered. Manny was a top managing prospect before he took the Washington job, but neither Washington (at the time) nor Cleveland were great opportunities.

On the plus side, he's still young, and he's also fluently bilingual (and the latter still don't grow on trees when it comes to managing candidates). I wouldn't be surprised if he's a bench coach somewhere in 2013 — maybe back with Houston? — which will leave him one step away from managing again.

Didn't the Indians fire their last manager with a week left in the season? Maybe it was Wedge...

Antonetti can't be very comfortable.

Pirate president Coonelly has said Hurdle, plus the GM, Farm Director, and Scouting Director, will return in 2013.

Does this include Kyle Stark, the guy who sent the Hell's Angel's email to the minor leaguers?

Did we ever have a BBTF thread on that? Can we? Its pure gold, the whole thing. 100% 24 karat.

Yes and yes.

People said good about Manny before he was hired in DC

Crap teams or not, Acta's career record is 372-518, a 418 WP. That's 95 losses a year. That's Tony Muser, Buddy Bell, Tony Pena territory.

Granted, Torre getting a job after his Mets tenure was odd, but he won with the Braves and the Cards before the Yanks job.

Acta's big problem is that his teams don't seem to get better under him. Now, that may not be his fault (Bowden, I think, did an especially bad job for Acta — and Nats' fans — in the 07/08 offseason), but the only way he can argue against this perception is to blame everybody else (GM, players).

I think Joe Kehoskie summarised it best:

More than anything, Manny seems like a cautionary tale when it comes to the risks of taking any managing job that's offered.

At least after Washington, he could have thrown Bowden under the bus and most people would nod in agreement. They would have seen a good organisational soldier who carried the can for the dreadful start in 2009 under a new GM who needed to be seen to do something in order to lose the 'interim' tag.

But after Cleveland, I'm not sure he can do that.

How the heck has it taken this long for Sandy Alomar to get even an interim managing job? I mean, if you were to tell me that I had to pick a former player without managerial experience to manage, I'd probably pick Sandy Alomar.

How the heck has it taken this long for Sandy Alomar to get even an interim managing job? I mean, if you were to tell me that I had to pick a former player without managerial experience to manage, I'd probably pick Sandy Alomar.

HOW LONG DOES RYNE SANDBERG HAVE TO WAIT?!?!?1111ONEONEONE

Maybe it's because I'm an off-the-charts cynic, but giving the job to Alomar just seems like one more of the myriad "living in the past with no real plan for the future" PR stunts being used by the Indians front office to sell tickets for a ballclub that's otherwise unwatchable. (See also: trading for Jim Thome last year, re-signing Grady Sizemore this past offseason.)

I hope I'm wrong and I wish him well.

Indians fans have been jerked around a lot since the run in the 90s, so I think it's nice that they throw the fans a bone when they can. None of it really matters until they have an extended run of winning, though.

I'm not informed enough to judge managerial candidates, so what the hell.

It's possible that Manny Acta has been jerked around by ownership. But I think that's too generous to a man with a six-year career composed of a succession of major failures.

Under Acta, the Nationals went from a 70-75 win team to a 60-win team. Under Acta in 2010, the Nationals were 26-61 (.298), and when he was replaced by Jim Riggleman they rebounded to 33-41 (.440). Under Riggleman, the Nats became the 70-75 win team they'd been before Acta arrived.

His record with the Indians is just as bad. He took a young and improving team and brought them nowhere. He had one pretty good season in 2011, but the 2011 Indians collapsed after a hot start and the 2012 Indians returned to the same crap level of play that most Acta teams produce.

He strikes me as someone who'd be an excellent Strat-o-Matic manager. He's extremely stingy with IBBs and Sac Bunts, he uses his bullpen in some non-traditional ways, and he really sounds like he has an excellent grasp of baseball tactics when he talks to the media. It's all the other, more important aspects of a manager's job where he seems to be failing.

HOW LONG DOES RYNE SANDBERG HAVE TO WAIT?!?!?

I don't know. I heard a rumor a couple of weeks ago that the Indians would look at Sandberg in the offseason.

Plus I think there are advantages to letting it be clear before the end of the season that there is an opening. You get the earliest attention from prospective candidates.

This job may be technically open, but I'd give Alomar an 80% chance of being manager on opening day next spring.

He strikes me as someone who'd be an excellent Strat-o-Matic manager. He's extremely stingy with IBBs and Sac Bunts, he uses his bullpen in some non-traditional ways, and he really sounds like he has an excellent grasp of baseball tactics when he talks to the media. It's all the other, more important aspects of a manager's job where he seems to be failing.

That sounds like the perfect profile for a bench coach.

It's possible that Manny Acta has been jerked around by ownership. But I think that's too generous to a man with a six-year career composed of a succession of major failures.

Under Acta, the Nationals went from a 70-75 win team to a 60-win team. Under Acta in 2010, the Nationals were 26-61 (.298), and when he was replaced by Jim Riggleman they rebounded to 33-41 (.440). Under Riggleman, the Nats became the 70-75 win team they'd been before Acta arrived.

His record with the Indians is just as bad. He took a young and improving team and brought them nowhere. He had one pretty good season in 2011, but the 2011 Indians collapsed after a hot start and the 2012 Indians returned to the same crap level of play that most Acta teams produce

Having suffered through the Acta regime, I would say this analysis is dead right.

I was surprised that, after the Nationals disaster, that not only one but two teams wanted to hire Manny as a manager. Why? What attributes or accomplishments did/does he have? He strikes me as someone who 1) must interview well 2) gives the owner and gm a warm feeling due to his quiet reserve and confidence, etc.

He just can't manage. As MCOA points out, his teams don't get a little worse; they get a lot worse. You can hang it on the ownership but that doesn't explain why he is continually seen as a candidate for a major league managing job. The Indians quit even more noticeably than the Nationals did under his narcoleptic leadership. Thank God those days are gone.

I saw this in my Facebook newsfeed this morning:

"Manny Acta has been fired. Hopefully, this leads to Leyland's retirement, and Acta's subsequent hiring as Detroit's next manager."

The guy is Tigers fan, and no, he was not being sarcastic.

I do not get the Leyland hatred coming out of Detroit.

I do not get the Leyland hatred coming out of Detroit.

They were pumped up as a super team this spring, ignoring their pretty evident weaknesses, and when the Kool-Aid drinkers didn't get a 110 win team they blamed it on the old cigarette smoking guy. They need a new face, someone calm and confident and professional...someone like......Manny Acta.

They still could win the World Series.

He makes some puzzling moves and has unexplainable favorites (hey, Ryan Raburn!), but most managers do. I don't really get it, either. And certainly not the notion that Manny Acta would be an improvement.

Under Riggleman, the Nats became the 70-75 win team they'd been before Acta arrived.

Well, that would make sense if it was the same personnel, but it wasn't. The absolute nadir of the Nationals 2009 was on 24 July, when they fell to 28-68, which was Acta's 26-61 plus Riggleman's 2-7 start.

But the team Riggleman was piloting was made up of different people not only from the one Acta took over in 2006, but also even the one Acta started the season with. The bullpen in particular was completely remade by Rizzo, who inherited a real mess in that department from the disgraced Bowden.

The 2009 Nationals started with a weak rotation and a worse bullpen, and Rizzo fixed the latter over the course of the season, leading to improvement under Riggleman.

The Indians quit even more noticeably than the Nationals did under his narcoleptic leadership.

This narrative doesn't fit with his 2011 Indians, which achieved the best record of his big-league career.

I don't want to play Manny Acta's best friend, but to blame him for 2009 obscures the fact that the damage was really done by Bowden. Acta was set up in the 08/09 offseason to take the fall, but then Bowden got caught up in the Dominican scandal. Acta still took the fall, but he probably would have been gone in 09/10 in any case. I thought it was pretty clear Rizzo had little confidence in him from the start.

[Leyland] makes some puzzling moves and has unexplainable favorites (hey, Ryan Raburn!), but most managers do. I don't really get it, either.

The other team I follow closely is the Tigers, and early on in Leyland's stint I came to the conclusion he left pitchers in too long, and that this was costing the club wins. Yesterday was a good example.

He makes some puzzling moves and has unexplainable favorites (hey, Ryan Raburn!), but most managers do. I don't really get it, either.

With very few exceptions anyone in any job will look bad if you scrutinize them enough.

His record with the Indians is just as bad. He took a young and improving team and brought them nowhere. He had one pretty good season in 2011, but the 2011 Indians collapsed after a hot start and the 2012 Indians returned to the same crap level of play that most Acta teams produce.

Gotta disagree with the notion that Acta took over a young and improving team. He took over a young and collapsing team.

Wedge took them to a 96-win season and within a game of the World Series in 2007, won 81 games in '08, then won 65 games in '09 and was fired. When Acta arrived in 2010, he had a few talented players age 25 and under (Cabrera, Santana, Brantley, Chris Perez, Masterson) and a giant pile of waiver bait. The good young players have largely improved under Acta, Masterson 2012 aside, and the dead weight has continued to be dead weight.

And I know it's sort of become a 'thing' to point out the collapse in 2011, but I see a team that played out of its mind for a couple months and then regressed back to where it should have been all along based on the talent.

I genuinely have no idea whether Manny Acta's a good manager, a bad manager, or somewhere in between. I'm not here to say he deserves to manage the 2013 Cleveland Indians.

What I do know is that there's not a man alive who could win baseball games managing this roster. Maybe (probably?) someone could do a better job, but the reason they've got the worst record in the American League is that they have the worst baseball players in the American League. That's on the guy(s) who put the roster together, not the guy filling out the lineup card.

Pretty much concur with 39. I don't remember who it was, but earlier in the season someone on here actually told me that the Indians were contenders to win the division. Yeah, I just about fell out of my chair when I read that one.

Pretty much concur with 39. I don't remember who it was, but earlier in the season someone on here actually told me that the Indians were contenders to win the division. Yeah, I just about fell out of my chair when I read that one.

That was me that got you laughing so hard (enough so you bumped it later on for the express purpose of laughing some more - ever the classy feller), but that wasn't what I intended. The point (perhaps inartfully made) was the Indians were batting for the division lead AT THE TIME, not a projection for their prospects for the remainder of 2012 (though I will confess that I had no idea how badly the 2011 Indians collapsed, being preoccupied as I was with my own team's descent).