With Orioles At A "Crucial Point" In Young Season, Their Systemic Failures Undo Them Again In New York

Whomever Mike Elias decided to hire as skipper of the Orioles was probably going to be overwhelmed, as obeisance and inexperience were primary job requirements.

And it’s worth noting that as miscast as 2025 interim skipper Tony Mansolino was for the job, he made a point of letting people know that if he got the full-time gig for 2026 he was going to run an “old-fashioned” spring training and drill the Orioles long and hard to try to snap their cycle of horrible defensive baseball and low-IQ in-game decision-making and unsound situational hitting philosophies that marred their play since around May of 2024.

We’ll never know what that would have looked like – and no one is pining for a bench coach thrust into a job he was ill-prepared for. But what is already painfully clear as the Orioles head toward the quarter pole of this season is that whatever rookie manager Craig Albernaz attempted to do in February and March with this bunch – to instill quality play and inspire them and help them finally take more pride in their craft – is failing miserably, leading him to launch into a clubhouse plea mere hours into the May in way Elias could never fathom.

Sunday’s totally predictable and utterly-on-brand thrashing by the Yankees (11-4 this time), already has the O’s (15-19) in crisis mode, just as they were a year ago when manager Brandon Hyde was ultimately cast aside. They butchered the ball again, at first base and third base and played once more without a real right fielder (Elias’s albatross signing of immobile, swing-and-miss maven Tyler O’Neil and insistence he plays is shameful at this point).

Free-agent reliever Andrew Kittredge, another aging arm that Elias made an offseason lynchpin, gave up seven hits and seven runs in 1/3 of an inning. Overall, The Birds conspired to play “The Elias Way” behind starter Trey Gibson, making his MLB debut under the most averse conditions, with teammates managing to routinely compound the degree of difficulty.

“For me it’s at a crucial point of, what team do we want to be?” Albernaz asked, with the answer to this point one as immature, unfocused and undisciplined as all recent vintages Elias has assembled. “We can just fold up, just thinking that everything will turn around itself. Or we can put the work in, in order to make this happen.”

Yeah, it really is that bad. This soon.

Can Widespread Errors Be Fixed In-Season?

One could argue the time to work all of this out was in the late winter in Sarasota, and thinking this product will reverse itself in-season feels naïve. Albernaz asked for blame for these systemic failures to go to him and his staff, but they predate him and fall squarely on Elias, who hired him.

Those who understand how much contempt Elias has to change anything significant about the way he builds baseball teams aren’t surprised by any of it. Since veteran starter Chris Bassitt spoke passionately about the “come to Jesus” meeting the pitching staff held between games of a doubleheader on Thursday, the Orioles are 0-4, outscored 38-15.

Their best player, slumping and overly-demonstrative shortstop Gunnar Hendrson, sat this one out as well he should have given the quality of his at bats and gaffes in the field. A bullpen that, for a week or two could be qualified as at least a middling strength on a roster that has none, is collapsing under the weigh of a rotation that can’t get 15 outs with any regularity and Elias’s latest façade is already crumbling, only he can’t make the skipper the fall guy this time.

They fell to 0-8 against left-handed pitching this season, and Max Fried wasn’t even that sharp for New York. Elias claimed he was going to fix their ineptitude against Southpaws right around when he fired Hyde a year ago, but the problem is as acute as ever. The theory that adding a power-over-everything first baseman (Pete Alonso) as a “leader” was going to reverse the culture of enabling and coddling and excuse-making Elias had conjured for the pillars of a rebuild that looks wildly overhyped now, was always silly.

Alonso does have a couple of solo homers in this series, about all of the scoring Baltimore could muster. They failed to cash in on a bases loaded opportunity Sunday – Jeremiah Jackson hitting into the double play this time - while Yankees slumping prospect Jasson Dominquez, who hadn’t homered since August, helped do some of the late damage against the bullpen as New York exploded for seven runs in the 8th, not that they didn’t already have this game in hand.

The Orioles just seem to do that for opponents, be it on the mound or in the box. Gibson, for his part, battled, giving up an early longball to Ben Rice but keeping the Orioles close enough. The bar is set pretty low as to what constituted hopeful right now.

“I was encouraged,” Albernaz said of the pitching prospect (the Orioles have not developed a honegrown, full-time MLB starter under Elias, who was hired in 2018). “It looked like he wasn’t fazed.”

Like usual, though, unless feasting on the bottom-feeders in a bad opposing bullpen, the Orioles didn’t really seem all that intent on a comeback. Their play is as devoid of passion and drive as the baseball executive who put all this together, and who managed to turn Hyde’s shaky job security coming into last season in a massive power grab for himself.

It’s way too soon to know if Albernaz is going to be up to this task as a real MLB manager, and with the circumstances around him, it’s probably untenable, anyway. But give him credit for addressing the severity of the situation in a way Elias – who took to gaslighting and obfuscating when he met the media in late April – could never acknowledge.

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