If The Orioles Are Serious About Changing Anything In 2027, Manager Craig Albernaz Must Go

Orioles ownership could not have provided a more emphatic endorsement of failing baseball executive Mike Elias than it did in late July. Particularly considering the growing fan unrest about a terrible MLB product and amid an eight-year tenure for Elias without a playoff win and with none on the horizon.

I have every reason to believe that billionaire was being honest – he doesn’t have the acumen or wherewithal or inclination to blow up a front office - and as long as he hits his profit margins it’s fair to surmise David Rubenstein doesn’t care about the standings. So if Elias and his minions are safe, but the fanbase is fairly enraged about the slop they must endure, while top talent keeps regressing and the perpetual rebuild makes no progress, something has to give.

Manager Craig Albernaz needs to be relieved of his duties as soon as the season ends, barring a most improbably postseason run, and this franchise better create a real budget for a real MLB coaching staff with the next skipper having an actual MLB resume that includes a real playoff win or two. At a minimum.

If Birdland is stuck with a failed baseball operations department and a terrible nightly product and that's only gotten worse through a succession of novice, puppet skippers who provide zero pushback to Elias, with zero power, to influence that product daily ... then that must change. That dynamic must be shifted, these feckless-and-profit-driven billionaires must recognize at a minimum there needs to be a paradigm shift in the dugout and Alex Cora or Joe Girardi or Buck Showalter must be the next manager of this once-proud franchise. Or someone like them.

Having meek, mealy-mouthed wannabees in charge, that the entire clubhouse knows have no jam, and who suck up to Elias at evert turn, must cease. We mist be spared of self-neutering nonsense like this, spewed by Albernaz, before Tuesday’s game (we already know Elias thinks the manager doesn’t matter; Albernaz reinforcing it while supposedly being the leader of the team, just doesn’t work).

“Mike (has) an impossible job, in my opinion,” Albernaz, a far too willing brown noser, uttered. “To keep one eye on the season at hand, but also another eye on the future of the org.”

Wow. How does Mike do it? How does he manage to suck so badly at both? Make it stop.

Power Dynamic Must Change

With the Orioles clinging to their failed core at the deadline, save for Rutschman, if they hope that Gunnar Henderson is salvageable after a year in the abyss and that somehow things will actually be different in 2027, Albernaz has to eat this one and take his money to go away (there won’t be offsets, if he has them, because like Brandon Hyde and Tony Mansolino before him, trust me, no one is ever hiring him to manage an MLB team again).

If you watched me chat with Jim Duquette or Mike Bordick or Bill Ripken or Showalter on “The Daily Flock,” it’s clear things are not being implemented properly at the MLB level and this team has been adrift of anything close to MLB fielding and base running and intellect since the middle of the 2024 season. If nothing else, Elias – who will always save himself and does understand the role that PR and optics play in everything – should be willing to conceded that a proven manager with his own way of doing things and autonomous staff – at a minimum - are in order.

Of course, many would point out – no GM gets to hire four managers. Certainly no GM who is this far below .500 for his career. And of course that’s true. But no GM this inept gets nine years on the job with this terrible personnel record, and that’s what we’re coming up on. No one this bad would not only survive the sale of a team, but get more money and more power from the people who inherited him.

That doesn’t happen in the real world. And let’s be clear, this is Bush League Baltimore, where no one is held to MLB standards and there is no accountability. This isn’t the real baseball world. It’s a private equity fiscal experiment where the quality of baseball is utterly secondary.

But at some point, we hope and pray, even if only to placate fans, Elias must have some checks on him unfettered power.

At some point, the overall way they do things and the strata and dynamics in place have to change in a meaningful way. Elias should’ve been fired three years ago and he should be fired tomorrow.

But if that’s somehow off the table, then change simply must start with a real manager making real money with some real power. It simply must start with an admittance that doing it the only way Elias has will never work.

But they need to at least nod toward the pathetically substandard product and why it keeps repeating. And the run of fake skippers needs to end with Albernaz, who is somehow the most out-of-his-depth of them all, with the fewest redeeming qualities.

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