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.