Manny Acta Fired

The Last Of The Old Regime Is Gone - Can We Turn It Around?

Well, I took a few days off to visit friends in Vermont (and no, I didn't get a chance to see a Lake Monsters game) and I come back to this news. It’s finally over. The Manny Acta era came to a merciful end last night when the team returned to Washington.

I applaud the move; Manny’s been on borrowed time since mid-April when the team – yet again – started so poorly.

From my perspective, Manny Acta wasn’t THE problem. This organization bred a “culture of losing” during the Acta era – a belief that “losing is acceptable” as long as the team heads toward a long-term goal.

Stan Kasten used a similar method to drag the Atlanta Braves out of the mire in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The problem is that Kasten came to Washington thinking the exact same methods would apply; but Washington’s situation was different than Atlanta’s.

Atlanta has a similar apathetic fan-base for its professional sports teams as Washington does. The problem is that Atlanta wasn’t a football town like Washington is. Atlanta will back a winner regardless of which sport it is – Washington would likely do the same but the Nationals, Capitals and the NBA team (assuming anyone really cares about the NBA) will ALWAYS have to compete with the Redskins.

Kasten wasn’t afforded the luxury Atlanta presented him with. Here in Washington, the Redskins rule the sports pages. You must do something remarkable to compete with them.

So with a brand new, jewel of a ball park the Nationals set out on their quest to build a winning ball-club in Washington – only they wanted to do so slowly like Kasten did in Atlanta. They carted out Manny Acta with a bunch of vagabonds passed off as major leaguers and built a 158-252 record over 2 ½ seasons. The end result was Kasten found Washington to be more apathetic than Atlanta and that’s the grossest miscalculation he made.

On the field, there just didn’t seem to be any accountability for the horrible mistakes players were making – at least not uniformly. I understand that players need to be treated differently because not all players are alike, but really? Physical errors, mental errors, lack of fundamentals were killing this team and only a select few seemed to have action taken against them (Dukes to the minors, Hernandez and Willingham forced to platoon, etc.) while others seemed to go unscathed (Hanrahan receiving multiple chances, Guzman not benched, Cabrera coddled despite repeated bad outings, Milledge receiving continued support in CF, etc.). Problem is, when things are going THIS badly you have to do something and it has to be done across the board. Everyone needs to be put on notice that a lack of the basics will result in a trip to Syracuse or to the bench. Manny only ever disciplined those he deemed as problem children and not necessarily as pandemic to the team. Manny lacked consistency – a plague reflected in the team’s play.

This spiraling effect took the team to the depths of awful they find themselves at now. This organization needs a change in philosophy and Acta had to go to make it happen.

In order to break free from this culture of losing, The Nationals need to follow the model of … The Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The franchise was the epitome of losing under Hugh Culverhouse and was the laughingstock of sports from 1976-1994. Malcom Glazer buys the team before the 1995 season and stands in front of a camera and says, “the Bucs stop HERE;” as if to say, “if you have a question about how this franchise is run, it falls on me – rest assured I will turn this around.” He fired Sam Wyche and brought in Tony Dungy who put a focus on the team. He identified as recipe for success and he implemented it. In Dungy’s first season (1996) as head coach, the Bucs finished 6-10, but they went 5-2 in their last seven games. Then in 1997 they changed their uniforms from the old creamsicle orange and a logo of Lance the happy pirate to red and pewter and a logo of a skull with crossed swords emblazoned on a tattered flag. They took the new look and added it to their new attitude and the team went 10-6 and earned a playoff spot. After an 8-8 season in 1998, the Bucs would then make the playoffs four straight years culminating in a Super Bowl championship in 2002.

All of this playing in a league where parity rules; and the Bucs broke 14 years of futility in just two years and made a successful run of winning seasons. The Arizona Cardinals couldn’t do, the Detroit Lions still can’t do it. The trick for the Nationals is model after Tampa – NOT after Detroit.

Ideally, the Nationals need to do more than to fire Manny Acta. They now have the “interim” tag on two MAJOR positions in the organization: general manager (Mike Rizzo) and field manager (Jim Riggleman). They need to address these openings quickly and get people they deem as important on board or else they run the risk of perpetuating the culture of losing.

Futility can end in success as long as the organization has a clear goal and a focused path to that goal. Is firing Manny Acta part of that plan? I certainly hope so, otherwise we may be the Detroit Lions of Major League Baseball – and with the Redskins ruling the sports world of Washington, the Nationals just can’t afford that anymore.