Indians fire manager Manny Acta

CLEVELAND (AP) — The Cleve­land Indi­ans have fired man­ager Manny Acta after the team col­lapsed from contention.

Acta, hired by Cleve­land in 2009 after two los­ing sea­sons as Washington’s man­ager, couldn’t stop the Indi­ans from falling to last place in the AL Cen­tral. They were within three games of first place on July 21 before los­ing 21 of 25 and even­tu­ally slid­ing all the way back to last. It cer­tainly wasn’t all Acta’s fault, but there were times when the Indi­ans seemed to be going through the motions and a lack of effort isn’t a pos­i­tive reflec­tion on any manager.

Acta went 214–266 in nearly three sea­sons with the Indi­ans, who are just 21–50 in the sec­ond half this sea­son. He had one sea­son left on his contract.

The Indi­ans announced Acta will not return in 2013 on Thurs­day, an off day before open­ing their final homestand.

Bench coach Sandy Alo­mar, a for­mer Indi­ans player and fan favorite who could become Cleveland’s next full-time man­ager, will replace Acta for the last six games of 2012.

The Indi­ans said the search for a new man­ager will begin imme­di­ately. Acta’s coach­ing staff will remain intact for the rest of this season.

Indi­ans gen­eral man­ager Chris Antonetti thanked Acta for his service.

“Manny’s pas­sion for the game, pos­i­tive atti­tude and tremen­dous knowl­edge of base­ball helped guide us to a num­ber of high points dur­ing his tenure,” Antonetti said in a state­ment. “Man­age­r­ial changes are never easy or taken lightly, but as we approached the end of the sea­son and turned our atten­tion to assess­ing the year, we deter­mined a change was necessary.”

Ear­lier this month, owner Paul Dolan said he was not con­sid­er­ing a man­age­r­ial change, but the Indi­ans con­tin­ued to stum­ble and left the club with lit­tle choice. Dolan indi­cated the deci­sion was made by Antonetti, who is in his sec­ond season.

“I have great respect for Manny and appre­ci­ate the effort he exhib­ited not only lead­ing our team, but also the con­tri­bu­tions he made in our com­mu­nity over the past three years,” Dolan said in a state­ment. “I fully sup­port Chris’ deci­sion to make this change and am con­fi­dent that he will lead a tire­less search to find the right indi­vid­ual to lead the club to our ulti­mate goal of win­ning the World Series.”

Acta main­tained a stoic atti­tude dur­ing the Indi­ans’ freefall and insisted he wasn’t con­cerned about his future but only about devel­op­ing young players.

It didn’t help Acta that sev­eral Cleve­land play­ers under­per­formed while oth­ers couldn’t stay healthy. For­mer All-Star cen­ter fielder Grady Size­more, who was signed to a one-year, $5 mil­lion free-agent con­tract in Novem­ber despite miss­ing most of the past three sea­sons with injuries, never got healthy enough to play. Des­ig­nated hit­ter Travis Hafner missed sev­eral months with a bad back.

And Antonetti’s major acqui­si­tion in 2011 of ace Ubaldo Jimenez failed to pay div­i­dends, as the right-hander went 9–17 with a 5.55 ERA.

After win­ning 80 games in 2011, the Indi­ans entered the sea­son with high hopes. It seemed as if they were in posi­tion to com­pete for a play­off spot before their inex­plic­a­ble col­lapse, going 5–24 in August.

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Sep 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.