Photo by ameschen.

Ken Rosenthal at FOXsports.com had the scoop that beleaguered Nationals manager Manny Acta will be relieved of his duties at some point this week, replaced by current bench coach and former major league manager Jim Riggleman. The forty-year-old Acta, the youngest active manager in the bigs when he was hired in 2007, has accumulated a 148-235 record in his two-plus seasons with the team — but has seen a steady negative decline since his inaugural campaign in 2007, when the Nats won 73 games. It was seemingly a matter of time before Acta was let go; at 16-44, there’s not much else to do but can the guy in charge.

Riggleman’s got a wide array of managerial experience, although none of it particularly encouraging. In his six-odd seasons at the helm in San Diego, Seattle and with the Chicago Cubs, he only had two winning seasons, including one playoff appearance in 1998. His most recent managerial experience was last season, when in an eerily similar situation, he took over for John McLaren with the Mariners and notched a record of 36-54.

.400 baseball? We’ll take it!

The most damning issue with Acta’s recent reign was not so much that he is a terrible manager, but that he was unable to make anything positive out of the awful hand that he’d been dealt. One gets the feeling that anyone who is going to be managing this team in the near future — whether it’s Riggleman or someone else — is going to have to be a person who can squeeze every bit of juice from a team of mostly rocks.

There’s no official word on when the transition to Riggleman will occur. The Nats are off Monday, on the road at Yankee Stadium until Thursday, and then back home for a series against Toronto.