Austin Kearns lives to fight another day

You can color me as shocked on this one. The Cleveland Indians have taken a flier on the 29-year old former blue-chip prospect Austin Kearns.

Kearns was offered a 1-year minor league deal. For all intensive purposes, this is an opportunity for Kearns to come to Spring Training and prove that he’s still in big league shape and can hit fastballs and help this Indians team in some way.

In case you didn’t make the connection, aparently Indians manager Manny Acta didn’t see enough of Kearns’ .195/.336/.305 line in 80 games with the Nationals this past season. Someone has also missed the memo that Kearns is as brittle as balsa wood.

If he plays in 110 games in 2010, we’ll buy you a steak dinner.

It is obvious that Kearns is never going to reach his full potential. But we still take particular interest in him because there was a day when we thought that he would be a white Manny Ramirez. Those days are long gone.