Tony Mansolino has been put in a tough position. It is his job today to engineer a turnaround for the most disappointing team in baseball. The Baltimore Orioles fired manager Brandon Hyde Saturday morning, after the team played sloppily and stranded a billion baserunners in a loss Friday night, their fourth in a row and 10th in 12 games. No one on earth could credibly claim that Hyde is bad at managing a baseball team: He took over in Baltimore when they were hopeless garbage, stuck it out through years of deliberate organizational ass-shitting, and then notched a dominant 100-win season the very first time he was handed a genuinely professional-grade roster. Along the way Hyde earned some managerial accolades and helped the O's to just their second first-place finish of this millennium. There is no question that Hyde can lead a very good baseball team.
The Orioles of 2025 stink real bad. They're 10th-worst in the majors by team OPS, and are second-worst in the majors by team ERA. Hunt around in the cool math if you must—Orioles hitters are generally underperforming their perfectly respectable expected numbers, per Statcast—but the very basic formula there is pretty straightforward: Baltimore's pitching staff allows too many runs, and their vaunted lineup is not doing anywhere near enough slugging to make up the difference. This team was talked-up as a World Series contender. With their eerily homogenized core of ultra-hyped position players, 2025 should be safely inside the early part of a long championship-or-bust era. Instead they are a last-place team, 11.5 games back of the Yankees and with a run differential that is second-worst in the majors, ahead of only the Colorado Rockies, who are a blight on the sport.
The scoring part has been frustrating, but not quite confounding. Gunnar Henderson is off to a slow start. Heston Kjerstad has not done consecutive correct things in a baseball game since September. Adley Rutschman has not yet realized that someone replaced all his bats with steamed whole zucchini. But help, at least in theory, is on the way: Jordan Westburg, Tyler O'Neill, and Colton Cowser are working their ways back from injuries. Yes, these three men were also off to putrid starts, but there are at least threads of evidence in their tracking numbers to suggest that they've been, to varying degrees, victims of bad luck. Westburg and O'Neill were doing more than their share of barrelling. Cowser, in a tiny sample size, was hitting the dick off the baseball, which is how he slugged his way to 3.1 bWAR during a very productive 2024 rookie season.
The low-wattage start for so fearsome a lineup shouldn't be a death sentence. The Royals, Rays, Rangers, Guardians, Astros, and Twins are all slugging worse than Baltimore, and each of those teams today has played to a winning record overall. What has set the Orioles apart has been the performance of their starting pitching. Baltimore's starters have pitched to a combined 6.01 ERA, second-worst in baseball, and a WHIP of 1.46, worse than all but those execrable Rockies and the utterly irrelevant Miami Marlins. Orioles starters have served up a league-worst 48 home runs, nearly three times as many as have been allowed by the starters of the New York Mets. There are 12 whole teams that have allowed fewer dingers than have been surrendered by Baltimore's starters. Only some of this can be blamed on Baltimore's shortened wall in left. Yes, O's starters are performing much worse at home. On the other hand, both teams famously have to send men to the mound, no matter the venue.
Baltimore's pitching already appeared to be in crisis back on April 20, when 41-year-old Charlie Morton was lit up by the Cincinnati Reds and the Orioles dropped a game by 22 runs. The situation has changed but without really improving: Hyde moved Morton to the bullpen and gave his spot in the rotation to 37-year-old Kyle Gibson, who joined the team as a sort of Oh-what-the-hell after being signed late in the spring. Gibson was rocked right away, allowing 11 hits, five dingers, and nine earned runs in a comically deflating and discouraging first start, against the Yankees. Five days later, he labored through four innings in a loss to the Royals. Next time up he took another loss, allowing 10 baserunners and five earned runs in Anaheim. So this was not immediately the solution to Baltimore's issues.
Even this was probably survivable for Hyde. Grayson Rodriguez, would-be staff ace, hasn't pitched this season. Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells are still recovering from UCL troubles. Albert Suárez is currently on the 60-day injured list. Zach Eflin, who was rock-solid for Baltimore down the stretch of last season, missed more than a month with a troublesome lat strain. The team was down some arms, and as a consequence was pitching poorly. But that loss Friday, man, it sucked. The Orioles had 14 hits and 18 baserunners and chased a frontline starter with relentless traffic, but scratched across a miserable three runs. They got a rare excellent start, this time from Cade Povich, but errors and general sloppiness handed the victory to the visiting Nationals, who also stink. The winning run, scored in the top of the ninth, came across when Washington's Nasim Nuñez beat out a two-out chopper to first base, and fill-in third baseman José Tena scored all the way from second, without even a real play at the plate. This was an ugly, embarrassing loss.
The Orioles have suffered other dispiriting losses this season, but Friday might've been the first time they looked haunted, even maybe demoralized. Roster shortages of one sort or another can be traced up the chain, at least in theory, to the suspect performance of general manager Mike Elias. But when the team hacks its own feet off, it's hard not to wonder if the manager's messaging has become the muted wah wah of Charlie Brown's teacher. "I’m as frustrated as anybody, and I try not to show that to the team," said Hyde, before Friday's clown-show. "We’re super positive in the dugout ... It’s a long season, these guys need our support. I want to be there to support them in any way that I possibly can."
I prefer positivity as a motivator, but I cringe to think of Hyde's painful dead-eyed rictus of forced cheer as his players sink, Artax-like,* into the swamp of despair. Hyde's players seemed to love him—for most of the very important ones, he was the only manager they'd played for after graduating from the minors—but the Orioles find themselves mired pretty desperately, while the season glides away from them. Having declined to spend serious money over the winter—having treated the departures of a top slugger and a staff ace as the unfortunate private business of a plucky middle-manager—Elias and new owner/bobblehead-model David Rubenstein bet on health and Hyde's magic touch. They were let down by the former, and as a result no longer have time for further testing of the latter.
If the bet was on Baltimore's guys finding motivation in the knowledge that their personal slumps had cost a good manager his job, first of all, ha! Second of all, whew, that did not work out. Mansolino, appointed the interim manager, jiggered the lineup a bit headed into the weekend, but the man does not carry magic pitchers around in his pants pockets. It was Gibson who took the mound for Baltimore's first post-Hyde game, and immediately all of the team's entirely non-motivation-related troubles zoomed hideously into sharp focus. Washington's leadoff man, C.J. Abrams, ripped a 3–2 fastball to right and took the extra base in flagrant, open disrespect of Kjerstad's defensive non-prowess. James Wood punched a grounder through the left side of the infield to score Abrams, and Nathaniel Lowe walked. Keibert Ruiz then reached out and smacked a liner to dead center for what should've been an easy out, but Cedric Mullins badly misplayed the ball and allowed it to fly over his head, scoring Wood. Luis Garcia Jr. worked a full count and then lined a ball into right, plating another pair of runners.
The Orioles had not yet collected an out, the Nationals had pushed across four runs without breaking a sweat, and Gibson was already sitting on 30 pitches. Mansolino, in the dugout, looked like a man who'd just encountered a tiger inside a public bathroom stall. Gibson never made it out of the inning; the Nationals tagged him for six runs and batted around, and the Orioles never mounted a comeback in what was eventually a 10–6 loss. Gibson was DFA'd with cleat-marks still showing bright red on his keister. On Sunday, the Nationals ran it right back, socking Eflin's first pitch for a dinger, adding three more off Baltimore's fill-in ace, and running out to their second 7–0 second-inning lead in less than 24 hours, en route to an eventual 10–4 win. The loss wrapped up a winless homestand; a larger than usual Camden Yards crowd Sunday couldn't resist booing the bozos in orange.
Mansolino was Hyde's third-base coach, and credits his predecessor with plucking him from the farm and helping to get him established in the majors, where he still feels like a noob. "I was a minor league coach and I probably should have spent more time in the minor leagues," said an enjoyably frank Mansolino, on Sunday. "The old era guys who spend 20, 30 years before they get one of these opportunities, I spent 10. It didn’t seem like enough probably." I know nothing about this man—even beat writers for the team-owned RSN are still learning his whole deal—but in media sessions he projects a guilelessness that I take as both a sign of personal character and an indication that he is going to get absolutely fucking creamed by the responsibility he's been handed.
For this man's sake I would hope that I will be wrong about that, except that it is not possible to look honestly at the condition of the 2025 Orioles without wishing painful comeuppance upon Elias, whose Danny Ainge-ian commitment to asset collection is much more to blame for Baltimore's poor start than anything Hyde did wrong. Now this poor blinking everyman has to work out a solution while leading a relatively inexperienced staff, with the team giving off a powerful stench of disillusionment, and while he is still learning what his new job even is. "We’ll start to kind of sit these guys down and talk to them and see where they’re at, see how they’re feeling, and see ways that we can kind of help the process move along," Mansolino explained, of how and when he intends to, you know, get established with his players during an upcoming road trip. "This is gonna linger a little bit and we’ve got to do the best we can to move forward and try to win some games."
"As the head of baseball operations, the poor start to our season is ultimately my responsibility,” said Elias Saturday, before and after not firing himself. "Part of that responsibility is pursuing difficult changes in order to set a different course for the future." The change was certainly painful, but has this set a different course? Two games into the Mansolino era, the important things are looking remarkably stable in Baltimore.
