While Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias and his staff work to identify and hire the best possible man to become the club’s new field manager, I have to ask:
Does it really make that much difference?
There are plenty of experienced candidates out there and everyone seems to agree that this will be a critical hire at a time when the Orioles are digging out of one of the more disappointing seasons in team history.
I’m not so sure.
The Orioles fired Brandon Hyde, a two-time American League Manager of the Year, because of the sudden reversal of fortune experienced during the first six weeks of this past season. Now, it’s likely they’ll end up with somebody who has been fired for similar reasons – perhaps multiple times – elsewhere.
Obviously, the role of the manager has evolved along with Major League Baseball’s industry-wide adoption of modern analytics. In general, he doesn’t choose the players and is expected to arrange the lineup based on the research being done by a handful of math geeks upstairs.
Yes, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I’m not the first person to wonder if we’re all overthinking this. It’s possible the right guy for the job is the one the Orioles fired or the one they are about to, but changing managers is one of the ways that unsuccessful teams mollify their fans and ownership.
That’s true in all the major sports and what is also true is that the teams with great track records generally weather their temporary downturns. We’ll see if that still will prove true with the struggling Ravens but history has proven that stability equals long-term success.
The Orioles appeared to be building that while they suffered through the difficult rebuilding years under Hyde and were rewarded with a surprising AL East title in 2023 – a year the wise guys in Vegas posted them as 50-1 long shots going into the season. They got back to the playoffs in 2024 in spite of a series of major pitching injuries but exited the first round for the second year in a row.
So, it wasn’t hard to predict what was going to happen when the club collapsed in April and May this year, though it also wasn’t hard to explain why … and it wasn’t because of the manager.
This is where I could really go off the rails and suggest that the O’s hire Hyde back, but that’s not where this is going. I’m only suggesting that – considering Elias’s recent comments about the search – whoever the Orioles end up hiring will be another manager very much like Hyde with a seemingly better but still imperfect track record.
The important thing is getting someone with enough credibility and name recognition to get the fan base excited enough to buy more season ticket packages.
What’s even more important is to get this search done quickly and then do the work that will really get the fan base excited, adding a real quality starting pitcher (or two) to bolster the rotation and rebuilding the bullpen from the ground up. Oh, and a solid right-handed bat wouldn’t hurt, either.
Because it’s really about the players. All you have to do is watch the star-studded teams battling each other in the playoffs to see that.