ALDS Managerial Report Card: Brandon Hyde
As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?
My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.
I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Evan Carter and the entire Diamondbacks roster have been great too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Bryce Harper is important because he’s a great player, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. I’ve already covered the losing managers of the Wild Card round. Today, it’s Brandon Hyde’s turn.
Brandon Hyde, Baltimore Orioles
Batting: C
The Orioles faced a predominantly lefty Texas staff. They responded the way they did a lot of the year: move Gunnar Henderson down in the batting order and bump up a few righties, then platoon the bottom of the lineup. That plan worked out fairly well. Texas felt compelled to stretch Andrew Heaney long enough in Game 1 to face Henderson a second time, which gave the O’s their first run when Ryan Mountcastle laced a fourth-inning double. Henderson was abysmal in a small sample against lefties this year, so you can see why the Rangers did it – but moving him down in the lineup imposed a hefty cost, so good work by Hyde there.
One problem: The lefty bats the Orioles brought in to pummel righty Rangers relievers aren’t really that great. Adam Frazier got the first pinch hitting opportunity. That’s just not a fearsome option. The roster construction imposed a bind. Frazier is the only lefty the team wants to platoon who can play either second or third. That means that if you’re pinch hitting for Jordan Westburg or Ramón Urías early on, you either need to use Frazier or burn two players, one to hit and one to sub in defensively. Hyde opted to use Frazier instead, and I guess I see why, but I might have just left Westburg in at that point. It was low impact, and the roster made it tough, but when you bring in a pinch hitter in a high-leverage spot, you’d like it to be someone scarier than Frazier.
The next game, faced with a lefty who was theoretically in for a longer haul, Hyde accordingly moved Henderson up a spot. Henderson went 2-for-3 with a homer against Jordan Montgomery – so much for the platoon disadvantage – but it didn’t matter much because the Rangers put up an 11-spot. The first time the Rangers brought a righty into the game was with two outs in the bottom of the eighth, with Mountcastle batting and two runners in scoring position. Hyde strangely stuck with Mountcastle. He did pinch hit for Westburg the next inning against José Leclerc, but in a game where runs were badly needed, Mountcastle was an uninspired choice against a reliever specifically brought in to face him.
The Orioles faced a righty starter in the last game of the series, which let them move to their preferred alignment with Henderson leading off. Just one problem – Nathan Eovaldi buried them. There was only one meaningful decision to make: Aroldis Chapman walked two straight batters to load the bases with two outs in the top of the eighth. That brought up Ryan O’Hearn, and Hyde called for Aaron Hicks to pinch hit. Bruce Bochy countered with Leclerc, who got the last four outs for a comfortable win.
I truly don’t get this move. Chapman had just thrown eight straight balls. You should want to keep him in a six-run game, because by the eighth, walks are the way you keep hope alive. If Bochy wanted to go to Leclerc anyway, fine. If Chapman regained his command, fine. But taking out your power-hitting lefty for a lighter-hitting switch-hitter got the wildest pitcher out of the game. That’s the only move I truly disliked.
Overall, not much that Hyde did offensively mattered. The Orioles played one close game, then ran into the teeth of a terrifying Texas offense. Such is life. But I didn’t like his pinch-hitting decisions very much, and I don’t understand what the point of putting Heston Kjerstad on the roster was if he wasn’t out there against righty relievers. The playoffs are about squeezing every last little bit of toothpaste out of the tube, and while Hyde’s lineup construction did that, his usage of pinch-hitters didn’t.
Pitching: C
Coming into this series, the conventional wisdom was that Baltimore’s starters would have to carry the weight for a faltering bullpen. The first test of that came in the fourth inning of Game 1, when ace Kyle Bradish gave up two doubles and a single to put Texas up 2-0. The Rangers then loaded the bases with two outs. Marcus Semien was due up. Hyde either showed more confidence in Bradish than I have, or less in his bullpen: He left him in, and Bradish won the matchup. But he didn’t have much left in the tank; after Corey Seager singled to lead off the next inning, Hyde went to the bullpen the next time a lefty appeared.
What followed was a textbook usage of relievers against a thin lineup. The Rangers don’t really have pinch-hitters on their bench. Hyde targeted the best lefties with his lefty relievers, used righties to face Josh Jung and Semien, and played the heart of the lineup by ear depending on leverage. The O’s got the matchups they wanted time after time, and held Texas to one run across 4.1 bullpen innings. Great work here, even if the end result was a loss.
The “lean on starters” plan didn’t last long in the next game. Grayson Rodriguez slipped out of a bases loaded jam in the first inning. The first three batters of the second reached, including Leody Taveras with a game-tying double. Having used his bullpen extensively the day before, Hyde tried to stretch slightly more out of Rodriguez. I wasn’t in love with the decision; there was a lot of traffic, the top of the Texas order is terrifying, and the next day was an off day. I particularly didn’t like leaving Rodriguez in after he walked Seager; the next part of the Texas lineup is a great place for a righty reliever. But Rodriguez stayed in and gave up two straight singles (including one lucky infield job and one laser beam), a force out, and then another single to finally chase him. Once burned and thus twice shy, Hyde used a high-leverage lefty, Danny Coulombe, to get out of the jam.
The plan from there was to do the same lefty/righty matching from before, but whoops, Bryan Baker walked the bases loaded. Jacob Webb came in with good matchups due up, but immediately gave up a grand slam. At this point, the game was basically over, which meant using Jack Flaherty to preserve the rest of the bullpen – only he needed 46 pitches to get through two innings, and allowed five baserunners and a run while doing so. The O’s used their high-leverage guys to close things out because that’s who was left, and they performed just fine.
Would Dean Kremer finally flip the script of short starts and bullpen stress in Game 3? He absolutely would not. Kremer looked shaky right from the start; he gave up a solo shot to Seager in the first, then put runners on second and third with Seager coming to the plate in the second. If I were Hyde, I would have pulled Kremer for a lefty and attacked Seager. He opted to intentionally walk him and leave Kremer in to face Mitch Garver.
I don’t want to be too reductive, but Kremer had a 4.51 FIP this year. He had a 4.12 ERA. Seven different available relievers posted better numbers than that; the only two who didn’t were the starters who transitioned to the bullpen. This was likely to be the highest-leverage spot in the game. It was a matter of how much to sacrifice the future (heavy workloads for the whole bullpen) for the present, but Hyde used the pitcher with the worst 2023 results in the biggest spot, and he paid for it.
After Kremer gave up a double and a homer to let the horses loose, the bullpen came in to close the barn door. They performed admirably; Kyle Gibson, the next day’s scheduled starter, went three innings. High-leverage relievers handled the rest. I’m sure the team didn’t want to burn Gibson, but it was an option all along if Kremer couldn’t go deep. Do that, then piece the next game together as a bullpen game, and you can have Bradish back with hopefully better results for the decider.
Hyde clearly came into this series hoping to push his starters. It’s not that he had easy decisions – Rodriguez and Kremer put him in awful binds right away – but when push came to shove, he preferred to try to wriggle out of jams with the starters instead of going to a bullpen that carried the team all year. I understand that it was a diminished bullpen, but it’s not like Félix Bautista was the only reliever who was any good. The whole team was good! That’s why they won so many games.
This is more of a strategic gripe than a tactical one. I thought that Hyde’s decision-making was consistently solid when he was choosing which reliever to send into the game. But this series hinged on starters getting blown up early, and the Baltimore bullpen was comparatively excellent. They managed a 3.78 RA/9 despite having to cover an outrageous 19 innings in three games. Not to get too results-oriented, but maybe the bullpen wasn’t so bad after all, and maybe the struggling starters, who were hardly the team’s strength this year, could have ceded even a little more work. You can’t control Rodriguez looking like his first-half self instead of continuing his dominant recent form, but a little more urgency would have been nice, particularly in Kremer’s outing.
I think this is of a piece with what I didn’t like about Hyde’s hitting decisions. He seems pretty good at the stuff you can work out beforehand – how to set the batting lineup, which hitters his relievers should be used for, and so on. The in-game decisions forced upon him by things the Rangers did felt less rehearsed, and thus looked worse in my eyes.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Leaving in Kremer, when he didn’t look good all game, was my biggest complaint of the series. The rest mostly comes out in the wash, but you can’t just cross your fingers that your starter, who looks shaky, will get out of the jam against the heart of the order in a do-or-die game. He needed urgency there, and not having it ended the season with 7 innings to go.
I have a theory that platoon-heavy lineups outperform in the regular season, but that once you’re running up against better pitchers in the playoffs it doesn’t provide the same boost. That against the better pitchers, you just need better hitters regardless of handedness.
At first glance, this series would seem to fit my theory. But it’s not like they did badly against Jordan Montgomery and hit the lesser pitchers hard. So I’m not sure that this fits my theory at all.
I have a similar theory. If we conceptualize success as a function of talent and “preparatory effort” (planning, playing matchups, etc.) we can then see if teams favor one or the other.
Think of “prep effort” as the likelihood a team pulls every lever offered to them. The Rays do, the Braves mostly let their best guys do their thing.
What I found, anecdotally, is that the effort-based teams like the Rays/Brewers/recent O’s/good-year A’s/etc. perform well in the regular season and look like deserving losers in the postseason. It rarely feels like they were cheated out of a longer run. I think that’s because the effort component flattens in the postseason. Basically, every team is trying their damnedest so talent tells more than preparation. It’s rare for a team to reach October and say to themselves, “let’s play like it’s May 25.”
If you look at the last couple decades of WS winners, you’ll notice they were all juggernauts or hot-at-the-right-time unicorns. The low-payroll, high-analytics teams that hang around every year have almost nothing to show for it. Certainly, some teams like the Dodgers and the Giants use the same script. The Dodgers are also swimming in talent, and the 2021 Giants melted.
We often call the playoffs a crapshoot, but the results suggest otherwise.
Maybe, but aren’t the Braves and Dodgers this year (and several before) confounding this altogether? I would not put either of them in the prep over talent category, but they haven’t fared all that better than the competition. I think I’m still in camp crapshoot.
The Phillies are definitely hot at the right time unicorns. I think we can throw the Dodgers this year out since they went into the playoffs with probably the worst rotation in the field.
That’s not how I view it. The Phillies are a talented team. Honestly, I viewed them as the best playoff roster entering the postseason. They tick all the boxes in ways a lot of the national coverage has completely missed or else mentioned in an off-hand way.
The DBacks have that unicorn look.
The Astros and Rangers are both talent-heavy clubs. The Rays, Brewers, Orioles, the Twins to some extent, they were the prep-over-talent rosters, and they didn’t look like they had any business advancing.
As far as I’m concerned, the 2023 postseason has already fulfilled the narrative I constructed.
The Ray’s had significant injuries. They would be the Phillies without Wheeler, Nola, Harper, Turner, Stot, and Sanchez. And a CF with a broken hand
The Braves didn’t let Harris do his hitting despite his being one of their best players with a 114 wRC+ vs lefties. Rather they let Kevin Pillar and Orlando Arcia bat in the 7th and Eddie Rosario and Vaughn Grissom bat in the 9th. Maybe using tactics not consistent with roster construction is the real downfall
I’m looking forward to Ben’s take on those moves. To me, either path is defensible. Sticking with the starters with an eye to the ninth inning might have been the better play – at the cost of like one-tenth of an expected run during the 7th rally. But, that’s a passive non-move. Managers are incented to make active moves with the season on the line.
I’m not convinced d’Arnaud gave them a better chance to score in the 7th. His overall batting projection is lower than Harris .319 vs .341. His 2023 wRC+ vs L was 116 vs Harris 114. It’s possible he was a better matchup or whatever but it seems extremely unlikely that it was worth depending on Rosario and Grissom later.
Even more strange was rostering Wall and Grissom in the first place
As opposed to Braden Shewmake or Chadwick Tromp? The Braves had a top-heavy roster with very little depth. Those were the only other eligible bats on the 40-man. Maybe they could have done the injury gymnastics necessary to get Culberson on the roster instead. Or Hoy Park, Daltan Guthrie, Mag Sierra, Yolmer Sanchez, Eli White. None of these guys are playoff roster players.
I’m idly researching this in the background this postseason; basically trying to come up with a way to quantify the platooniness of teams to go from there. I think you and Brad are onto something, it does feel like little-edge things that work well int he regular season lose a bit of effectiveness against ultra-tryhard opponents. Also batting strategies that rely on your opponent not countering with pitching work better when they’re looking at some grand long-term pitching plan instead of just facing off against you with no tomorrow.
Right. I’m not confident this can be easily quantified, but it seems to follow that teams are more constrained in the regular season when it comes to countermoves. Also, roster composition is different.
If the NLDS Gm 4 was a normal June game, Rob Thomson lets Ranger Suarez pitch deeper and doesn’t bother moving Kimbrel into the high-leverage 7th-inning. Decisions have to be made with an eye toward surviving 162 games. Some teams (like the Phillies) built top-heavy toward that goal. Some (like the Rays) go wide. And some lucky bastards (the Dodgers, usually) do both.
I also wonder about managers who put players in new situations in the playoffs. With Mountcastle: he had barely played against righties late in the season. Playing him here regardless was a surprise.
Nice article. The only thing I would add is bringing in Bryan Baker in a high leverage spot when he barely pitched in the majors in August and September
Yeah, the platoon call was good but the specific choice felt poor.
It wasnt a high leverage spot. It was the 3rd inning and the 8 and 9 hitters were due up. And you needed 7 innings from your bullpen. If you were ever going to get an inning from Baker, that was the spot. He just sucked.
Well, it was higher leverage than when they were down 9-2. I’m more of the opinion that you should bring in better relievers when you can instead of saving them for an opportunity that never comes.
Including Hjerstad instead of another arm like Fuji, wild as he can be, was mystifying. And then you don’t use him anyway?
Swapping out Adam Frazier for Jackson Holliday alone will significantly upgrade the Orioles’ 2024 lineup.
I am glad you mentioned that 4th inning PH spot of Frazier for Wesbturg in Game 1, because it did feel like it screwed up the late game substitutions. Never getting an opportunity to pinch run Mateo, because you had to use him as a defensive replacement instead, was a mistake.
For Game 3, it seems like Hyde could have done a) Hicks in center instead of Mullins, b) Mateo at short after his incredible game 2 with Henderson at 3rd instead of Westburg and c) Kjerstad at DH instead of O’hearn who had been struggling
Always prepare your fall back options but they had just about the worst case outcome from their starters minus Bradish. I’m mostly bummed that they couldn’t extend the series. It will be interesting to see if they make any moves over the off-season to address their rotation considering all the young and cost controlled talent they have on the roster.