The Eric Wedge and Mark Shapiro era in Cleveland can be summed up pretty well from the well-known quotation from Charles Dickens "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". The Cleveland Indians were up 3-1 on the Boston Red Sox in the 2007 ALCS and looked poised to win their first championship since 1948. The Tribe pulled a major league choke job and lost the next 3 games, falling in the series to the eventual World Series Champs. It had at one time looked like the Indians would take the mantle as one of the top American League teams for years to come.

Artwork by Tom Galmarini. Click image to view larger.

Flip ahead to 2009. One season after a bittersweet .500 finish, the latest Tribe team has the feel of the 1987 Indians. The '87 Indians had huge bats in the lineup anchored by the likes of Julio Franco and Joe Carter. The team was predicted to win the World Series by a number of national publications such as Sports Illustrated. The team scored a lot of runs but had an Achilles heal that led to their ultimate demise and last place finish - they had no pitching. The fall guy for the failure was Tribe manager Pat Corrales, whose pitching staff ended the season with a 5.28 Earned Run Average. He was dismissed in the middle of the season. Now Wedge, who has a pitching staff that currently carries an eerily similar 5.27 ERA, finds himself the talk of joining the increasing ranks of Ohio's unemployed.

If Wedge is to get the axe, would it be fair that Shapiro retain his job as general manager? The once highly thought of GM missed his chance to repair the beleaguered bullpen last season when he traded CC Sabathia for a ham sandwich (that CC probably stole and ate for himself) and three Minor League players that probably will never pan out. Even stranger is the timing in which he started the fire sale. Instead of waiting until the Indians were dead and buried, he made the trade a month before the deadline. Memo to Shapiro - teams are always looking for left handed arms on July 31st. He committed the same sin earlier this week by pulling the plug on the productive Marc DeRosa, essentially putting up the white flag for the 2009 season. I don't know about you, but I don't like to surrender with more than half the games left to play, and if I were a season ticket holder I would be rather upset. Shapiro has pulled off some great trades in the past but it may be a good idea to blow the whole thing up new again.

If the Wedge-Shapiro era is, indeed, seeing its final days, who do you think the fans would like to see back at the helm? I have inkling that they wouldn't mind seeing a reunion of John Hart and Mike Hargrove return to the posts and maybe rekindle those fun days of the mid-to-late-90's when the Indians were agonizingly close to ending the long drought between championships in this city.