Whether or Not This Is Final Acta, Nats Need to Change Script

There has been a lot of moaning and groaning among those still paying attention to the Washington Nationals lately about the team's bad luck.

If you're one of the few who watch the team's games on television with any frequency, you know, courtesy of Rob Dibble, that the Nats never get a call. The Nats are also the only team in baseball that ever has to deal with injuries. And then there's the media, which simply doesn't understand the very good reasons why the team woke up Monday morning with a 16-45 record and embarrassing attendance figures for a team in its ballpark's second season.

Oh, one other thing: Mother Nature doesn't like the Nats either. That's why it rains at some point during every home game.

The last complaint is legitimate: The weather has been brutal all spring. Apparently Mother Nature is a tired of all the excuse-making, too.

This past weekend provided more evidence of why the Nationals have become an embarrassment.

On Saturday, Fox Sports's Ken Rosenthal reported that the Nationals are about to fire Manager Manny Acta and replace him with bench coach Jim Riggleman. Team President Stan Kasten responded to the report with a classic non-denial denial: He doesn't discuss personnel issues, but he certainly isn't happy with what's been going on this season.

Acta better not take out a second mortgage anytime soon.

There are two questions here, one much larger than the other. The smaller question, unless you are Acta and his family, is his fate with the team. There are plenty of reasons to keep Acta, a couple of reasons to fire him.

The reasons to keep him are evident every day. He's a class act; he's a bright, young baseball guy managing a young team. His players like him, and they show up every day and really try to play for him, albeit not very well. If Acta is fired now, you can bet he's going to get another managing job down the road, and there's a very good chance he'll be a success.

So why fire him? Because sometimes in sports you have to make change for the sake of change. One can almost feel the "here we go again" sense the players have in the late innings night after night. Most nights they know there are two guarantees: It's going to rain, and they're going to find some way to lose either by bullpen implosion or some horrible defensive gaffe.

Granted, Luis Castillo re-wrote the book on horrible defensive gaffes Friday night, but the Nats not only lead the planet in errors, they almost never make a play to bail out their pitchers. They are so bad defensively that numbers don't come close to telling the whole story.

Some of that is on the manager. There comes a time when he needs to pull a Gil Hodges and march onto the field and pull someone after yet another mental transgression or break up the clubhouse or have everyone come in early every single day for extra defensive work until they start to get it right.