It’s Oriole Mess Out There

Before Game 2 of last year’s AL Wild Card Series, I asked Brandon Hyde a kind of stupid question. The Orioles, having been swept in the ALDS the year before, found themselves down 1-0 to the Royals in the series and were facing another rapid postseason elimination. The Orioles’ rebuild had gone on so long, and developed so much talent, that their progression to World Series contention had been assumed.

Hyde, the rare manager who’d survived a 100-loss tanking season through to the playoffs, had yet to win even one postseason game. So I mentioned that in other sports, coaches in his position have levers to pull in such desperate times. Was there anything a baseball manager has up his sleeve in a must-win game?

“I’m planning a spot to onside kick, try to get the ball back as quick as I possibly can in good field position,” Hyde joked in response. “Or I’m going to try to be like UNLV back in the early ’90s with Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson, and try to get up and down the court as fast as possible. Besides that, I’m going to use my relievers as best I possibly can, try to put some zeroes up and try to score some runs.”

Hyde went there because he knew what I already knew when I asked the question, and so did everyone else in the room: There’s not a hell of a lot the manager can do in that situation.

Last year, the Orioles had the second-best offense in the AL, by both runs scored and wRC+, in both cases trailing only the team that had Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. And pitching wasn’t the problem in the playoffs; Corbin Burnes was awesome in Game 1, and Zach Eflin and six relievers fought the Cy Young runner-up to a standstill in Game 2.

But in 18 postseason innings, this offensive juggernaut scratched out just a single run. That won’t cut it anywhere, and the Orioles went home empty-handed for the second year in a row.

I thought about that moment in the bowels of Camden Yards on Saturday, when the Orioles thanked Hyde for his seven-and-a-quarter years of service and sent him home.

The — and I apologize for using this word, but it’s the only way I can express it — vibe around the Orioles turned during that loss to the Royals. The organization had a new owner with something to prove. Burnes and Anthony Santander were free agents at season’s end, and various other supporting players were aging into the expensive parts of arbitration. The goodwill the Orioles had earned in 2023 and 2024 had been spent; merely appearing in the postseason would not be good enough.

The Orioles are by no means in this bad a position, but what I wrote about Bud Black and the Rockies last week was true of Hyde as well: Part of the manager’s job is to be fired. When a baseball team starts sinking, there’s an order in which the heads roll, and the manager is often at the front of the queue.

I even called this, sort of, back in November. The Orioles added Buck Britton to Hyde’s major league coaching staff; Britton had just led the Norfolk Tides — whose roster included numerous current Orioles — to an International League title in 2023. Adding a natural successor to the big league staff only underlined how wobbly Hyde’s chair had become. It’s how things work in football, and basketball, and hell, even in season three of Friday Night Lights.

In the end, it was third base coach Tony Mansolino, not Britton, who got this hospital pass of a job. A lot has changed since October. The Orioles fell behind 7-0 to the Nats in Mansolino’s first game and 6-0 in the second, both losses. Chelsea Janes described the spectacle in terms so vivid I simply have to quote her directly:

“I know the Orioles have a lot of issues. But they don’t have this many issues. This year has been like, an offended-the-baseball-ancestors-type, stepped on the foul line, someone broke a mirror-level debacle.”

If Mansolino didn’t already know how powerless a manager can be, he’s about to find out. He’s a decade younger than Hyde, which means he’ll probably be looking to Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas for inspiration in no time.

The Orioles have had some bad injury luck this year. Jordan Westburg has played 23 games; Colton Cowser has played just four; Grayson Rodriguez has played zero. Eflin has been on and off the IL, as has Tyler O’Neill, who went back on it the day after the Orioles fired Hyde.

Another mortifying roster move on Sunday: the DFAing of Kyle Gibson, who along with Charlie Morton, has not been able to bring veteran stability to a rotation that started undermanned and only became more so after Burnes’ departure and Rodriguez’s injury. Jackson Holliday and Gunnar Henderson have merely been good, rather than MVP-quality, while Adley Rutschman’s horrendous second half of 2024 has seeped over like a rancid ooze into the new year.

Good teams, well-constructed teams, suffer injuries and start cold every year. As of this writing, the Braves, Diamondbacks, Brewers, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Rays, Royals, Rangers, and Astros are all within four games of .500. Four of those teams made the playoffs last year; all of them, like the Orioles, started 2025 with at least a one-in-three chance of making the playoffs.

If the Orioles had gone through all those injuries and slumps and ended up where the Rays are, I don’t think anyone would’ve been surprised. Hyde would almost certainly still be in a job. But they’re 15-30; the only AL team with a worse record is the White Sox. Baltimore’s run differential is the second-worst in all of the majors, ahead of the aforementioned Rockies. This isn’t a cold team. This is a bad team.

It shouldn’t be. This ballclub came out of a seafloor-dredgingly awful tank with three no. 1 overall prospects: Rutschman, Henderson, and Holliday. Plus Rodriguez, Westburg, Cowser, Félix Bautista, Kyle Bradish, and the already-in-situ Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle. That’s the foundation of a very good team, as the Orioles showed in both 2023 and 2024.

But there’s something you need to know about foundations.

One of my favorite professors in college taught a class on Russian foreign policy. During a decades-long academic career, he’d been back and forth to what was then the Soviet Union numerous times, and accumulated enough interesting stories and funny one-liners to fill an entire semester. He had one about flying into Moscow during the Cold War and getting a cab into town. As in most big cities here, a big highway connected the airport to the city proper, and along the side of the road were dozens of fitted-out foundations, with nothing on top of them. My professor, naturally, asked his driver what was up.

“The foundation guys met their quota,” the cabbie said. “But the building guys didn’t.”

In Baltimore, the building guys are the two men quoted in the press release announcing Hyde’s firing: GM Mike Elias and owner David Rubenstein.

As much as I have great personal sympathy for Hyde, when a team with World Series ambitions starts 15-28, it’s hard to make the case that the manager is doing a good job.

But Hyde’s firing raises other questions. How is it that the Orioles lineup ended up with a load-bearing Tyler O’Neill? It wasn’t exactly out of the question that he’d get hurt, given his history. Maybe Elias is just inveterately optimistic about his players’ health. About a month ago, he expressed surprise that his top three pitchers had all gotten hurt at the same time: “Obviously, we knew Bradish was going to be out. But to have Grayson and Eflin on the shelf simultaneously this quickly into the season, at no point were we forecasting that, or expecting that. And that’s just the truth.”

It’s not the norm to have three good starters on the shelf at once (unless you’re the Dodgers, I guess), but it can happen. In fact, it happened to the Orioles last August with these exact same three pitchers, plus John Means. Who could’ve foreseen such a thing?

Speaking of the rotation: Why did the Orioles, instead of spending $33 million this winter to bring back Burnes, dish out a nearly identical sum to Gibson, Morton, and 35-year-old Tomoyuki Sugano? (If Sugano continues to outperform his FIP by nearly two runs all year, more power to him. But I’m looking at his peripherals the way I’d look at smoke coming from a neighboring house.)

It’s not like Rubenstein hasn’t spent, at least in relative terms. The Orioles won 101 games on a $66 million payroll in 2023; this year, they’re spending $165 million. Why aren’t they three times better? Well, that $165 million payroll is 15th in all of baseball but only fourth in the AL East, where the Yankees are spending $287 million, the Blue Jays $253 million, and the Red Sox $211 million, all before the luxury tax.

More than that, the 2023 Orioles were built mostly of pre-arbitration players. Merely keeping the band together involves paying players as they age through arbitration. There are 15 players from the 2023 major league team who are still in the organization. That year, they made a total of $32.1 million. This year, those 15 players make $54.5 million, a figure that would surely be at least $10 million higher had Bradish and Bautista both not undergone Tommy John surgery.

When cheaper role players age into arbitration or free agency, replacements must be brought in. I already mentioned the 35-and-over starters’ club, but Andrew Kittredge, Seranthony Domínguez, and Gregory Soto are making a combined $22.85 million. That’s not even a good bullpen (or a healthy one, in Kittredge’s case); that’s just what it takes to get decent middle relief.

The Orioles dumped their bad contract from 2023, James McCann, who made $12.15 million in his final year with the team. Which saved them all of… $3.65 million after they signed Gary Sánchez to fill the same role. Replacing 2023 Santander with 2025 O’Neill cost an additional $8.1 million, with markedly worse results. The ledger goes on like that.

When the Orioles have dealt from their prospect surplus to acquire veteran talent, the results have been mixed. They got Burnes on the cheap, and he was great during the 2024 regular season and unbelievable in the playoffs. But they let him walk after only one year, choosing to go with the veteran appetizer sampler over the Cy Young winner. The Trevor Rogers trade has been such a nightmare I wrote two different articles within six months about what a nightmare it was.

You can put a foundation in the ground for cheap (at least in this metaphor, if not in real life), but putting a building over it is a different project. It requires at least two of the following: luck, which the Orioles have not had this year; money, which Rubenstein has not yet spent in necessary volume; and cleverness, which Elias and his staff have not exhibited to the extent required to overcome limitations elsewhere.

Somewhere in another timeline, this Orioles team has stayed healthy, gotten the breaks, and received better-than-replacement-level production from its two big free agent signings. After all, Baltimore’s preseason playoff odds were 45.0%; even from a projection system that supposedly hates this team, that’s better than a puncher’s chance.

Likewise, there’s a timeline in which a $250 million Orioles team not only re-signs Burnes, but adds Max Fried and/or Alex Bregman as well. And that team could also face plant in the first two months of the season, to the peril of Hyde’s job.

The same excuses would certainly apply in that case. But those excuses would be more credible if the Orioles hadn’t left so much to chance when building this roster. There’s only so much a manager can do.