Should Brandon Hyde be Scapegoated for this Season?

It looks like the Orioles will not be winning the division. I am not happy about it especially because I’ve written so many times that I thought this Yankees team was not very good and I told a lot of people that they were massive frauds that would fade down the stretch and alas it was the O’s who completely melted down in the last 2 months of the season and fumbled away the division in embarrassing fashion. 

As far as the collapse goes there have been a lot of reasons, excuses and blame thrown around for why this team is going to come up short of their goal of defending their AL East title. There are obvious ones that feel like cop outs like injuries to key players and having Craig Kimbrel on the team, there are big pictures questions about if the front office did enough in the offseason to reinforce the team after some the injuries they knew they had, there are frustrations with the offense and the hitting coaches. But the person who will bear the brunt of the blame this off season if the O’s get blasted out of the wild card round will be the Manager Brandon Hyde so I want to look at some of the criticisms fair and less fair that Hyde will receive whether or not he gets fired. 

Hyde 

Being an MLB manager is a tough position, fans don’t want to blame their favorite players for coming up short and the front office and general managers often develop their own fans that don’t want to blame them for the players that are on the field and you just don’t meet a lot of people that are big fans of the manager. So the manager often ends up as the punching bag and fall guy for the shortcomings of the players and the front office. 

Not that players and GMs don’t get criticized but fans know that if the players aren’t good enough and the front office isn’t smart enough that is a difficult problem to fix that could take a long time so you hope that the problem is the manager because he can be fired and and replaced in a day.

All that to say that I am sympathetic to the position that Brandon Hyde is in. That being said I am not some Brandon Hyde superfan either. 

I would say that he did a good job during the really really bad years when he first took over where he was given a roster that had no shot of competing and his main job was to steer a ship full of holes through rough seas and make sure that the wreck wasn’t overly embarrassing and demoralizing for the crew even if most of the crew wasn’t going to be the crew in a few years when the ship would be making more important voyages. 

However now that the team has expectations so does the manager so here are some criticisms that Hyde gets that I think are either fair or less fair. 

Fair Criticisms

The Lineup Inconsistencies 

Every manager has their process and sometimes it’s hard to know where the front office ends and where the manager begins when it comes to lineup decisions. You hear stories of the managers being handed the lineup card by the front office/ analytics guys but I don’t think that is very common if it happens at all and I don’t think that is the case with Hyde. I think he does get a fair amount of information from our analytics team and the hitting/pitching coaches as far as potential matchups and then he makes the lineup himself. 

Ever since we had players good enough for it to matter I have found it frustrating how much the lineup fluctuates day to day and how rarely it feels like we are playing our best 9 guys. When the O’s were healthy they had more than enough really good players for the lineup to be really strong 1-9 and it felt like Hyde was always finding a way to sneak 2-3 guys who can’t really hit into the lineup. 

I’ve always thought that must be pretty frustrating for most the players not knowing whether or not they would be playing on any given day but up until this season when Hyde was doing this it didn’t seem to bother anybody but this year with even more young guys coming up and vying for playing time it seems to have created some problems. Austin Hays was clearly upset before he was traded, I don’t think Cedric Mullins loved being in and out of the lineup and young guys like Kjerstad, Holliday, Norby, Stowers and Mayo were not huge fans of being called up only to sit behind Austin Slater, Emmanuel Rivera and Livan Soto. 

Now you could definitely say that all the names I dropped in the last blurb didn’t perform to the level that merited getting everyday run but I think the constant changing makes it difficult for guys to get into a rhythm especially for the righties who when they get relegated to a platoon role get stuck on the short end of the platoon and when they are young guys like Mayo and Norby they haven’t even seen that many lefties in their career so it’s not like they are exactly lefty specialists yet. 

Obviously you can’t just leave someone who is in a disastrous slump in the lineup when there are capable bats on the bench who could step in and I gave Hyde a lot of credit that he realized how bad Hays was playing and how well Cowser was playing and very quickly pivoted to playing Cowser everyday. So it’s a delicate balance between playing the best possible lineup as much as you can and making sure that all the position players on the roster have enough playing time and I don’t think it is fair to expect Hyde to get it right every single time but his current process seems to make it harder to get it right.

Part of the issue is that Hyde, and maybe the whole front office but it manifests itself through Hyde, is obsessed with getting the platoon advantage even when it means getting worse hitters in the lineup. This isn’t unique to Hyde either as we just saw the Tigers load up their lineup with lefties against Burnes who is better against lefties and get dominated twice. 

I understand why getting a platoon advantage is good thing but it feels like the Hyde doesn’t even bother to check if the guy he’s using in a platoon role even has good splits and he’s just looking at the part of the stat that says bats: R to decide if Austin Slater should be the leadoff man today. If we had a someone with crazy splits like Tyler O’Neil I think it would be cool to sit Cedric Mullins against a lefty but in general none of the end of bench guys that Hyde uses for platooning have crazy splits like that where you can say yes the overall numbers are bad but he’s basically an all star against lefties they’re just mediocre hitters who happen to be right handed. 

This also comes up with pinch hitting and more than once the lineup has gone all the way around and now we’re in a higher leverage situation with a platoon disadvantage but now you can’t pinch hit because the guy you would like to face the righty has already been pulled from the game so that Eloy Jimenez could bounce a ball to third and get thrown out before he’s halfway down the line. 

I should acknowledge that the pinch hitting numbers for the Orioles have been very good this year although I would say that that is in part a product of having guys that should be in the starting lineup on the bench. I know this is real hater stuff but pinch hitting numbers are always small sample size theater and very volatile season to season for example just 2 seasons ago the Orioles were one of the worst teams in the league at pinch hitting with a pretty similar roster. Also the Orioles only have 1 pinch hit home run out of their 39 pinch hit hits so they are relying a lot on BABIP.

Again this is one of those things where as long as everyone is happy and the team is winning then it is ok that the lineup is a unique concoction every day and guys are getting pinch hit for in big spots but this year I think it’s gone poorly. 

Not Playing The Young Guys 

Here are all of the Orioles position player prospects who came into this season with less than a year of major league service time. 

Jordan Westburg 

Colton Cowser 

Jackson Holliday 

Heston Kjerstad

Connor Norby 

Kyle Stowers (not technically a prospect but still) 

Coby Mayo 

This is a lot of young talent to fit onto a roster especially when the guys already on the team won 101 games last year and aren’t fading out of their prime so again I am sympathetic to the fact that it is tricky to find playing time for all these young guys. 

Jordan Westburg has been getting everyday playing time since the start of the season which seems obvious but at the beginning of the year there was some concern that he might get stuck splitting time with the other infielders so that was a good move by Hyde to lock Westburg into the starting lineup everyday and it paid off with an all star season before his injury. 

Colton Cowser started off the season as the 4th outfielder but played very well in the limited opportunities he was getting and took over as an everyday starter to the point that he was probably our best outfielder for most of the season. 

When Jackson Holliday has been up he has gotten to start most of the time so that has been good but what I haven’t loved about how he has been handled is that Hyde pinch hits for him at the end of games and basically treats him as a platoon bat in high leverage situations. I don’t like the pinch hitting for 3 reasons, reason #1 is that I think it is important for his development and his confidence that he gets to make important at bats. Reason #2 is that the guys we are pinch hitting him for are not good players, it would be one thing to use Ryan Mouncastle off the bench to get a platoon advantage but as is we’ve used Austin Slater, Emmanuel Rivera and even Coby Mayo. Reason #3 is that Holliday has actually been really good in high leverage at bats in fact when you look at his fangraphs page high leverage is one of the only stat lines that looks good at all. 

I know that Holliday hasn’t played well enough to “deserve” anything but getting pinch hit for and like I said if pinch hitting him gave us a real advantage I think that would be fine but pulling our top prospect for slumping Austin Slater is a bad move and I went and checked and it has worked zero times so I think Hyde should cut it out. 

Kjerstad is an interesting case because I would put his lack of usage more on the front office than Hyde although Hyde is not blameless. Kjerstad played well enough in his time on the team last year and in spring training to start the season on the major league roster but there wasn’t enough room made for him so he didn’t get called up until late April where he played sporadically for a few weeks before getting sent back down. He then got called up in late June and this time to Hyde’s credit he played a good amount and produced very well before being drilled in the head by Clay Holmes and losing the ability to see the ball. (he did keep playing for a few weeks after that and “cleared” concussion protocol but clearly wasn’t right so what does that say about the concussion protocol?) He battled back from the concussion and got called up again and Hyde who has been desperately searching for offense has played him in every game since he was called up. 

Similar to Holliday, my biggest issue with how they use Kjerstad is how eager Hyde is to pinch hit and defensive replace him. It’s actually more frustrating with Kjerstad because he is 26 years old and had seen enough lefties in his career and has hit them well enough that we don’t need to yank him out of the game to get Eloy Jimenez (who stinks btw) some platoon at bats. On defense I will admit he’s not Dalton Varsho in the corner but similar to what I would say with defensive replacing Anthony Santander I’ve never seen a game swing on a play that Ryan McKenna or Austin Slater made that Heston Kjerdstad or Anthony Santander wouldn’t have also made. Let Heston face lefties and take his lumps in the outfield!

Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers aren’t on the team anymore so I won’t spend to long bemoaning their lack of playing time where they were here and Stowers has been pretty brutal in Miami but Norby is now showing us what he could have been if we had given him an everyday role OPSing .848 in 30 games although when we traded him we thought we had most of the infield locked down and couldn’t have foreseen the Westburg injury just days after the trade although we probably could have foreseen trading Norby for Trevor Rogers was a disaster. 

Coby Mayo probably got the worst end of the rookie treatment stick out of all these guys. He gets called up and it’s immediately clear that the manager doesn’t trust his defense so he’s getting pulled from every game he starts on top of that he struggles so he gets relegated to platooning vs lefties which he’s not actually great against. Jim Palmer said it on the broadcast when Mayo was getting owned by Blake Snell. It’s hard to get called up then buried on the bench and then only put in the lineup vs a guy like Blake Snell where even though you have the standard lefty righty platoon advantage Snell is brutal no matter what side of the plate you’re standing on same thing with being asked to pinch hit off the bench “hey we’re barely gonna play you and your only at bat of the week is going to be against the other teams nastiest lefty reliever” 

During the 6 games vs the Rockies and White Sox Mayo only played 2 of the games. You would think vs 2 teams that you should dominate, you could sneak your struggling rookie into the lineup so that he can get some at bats off those poorer pitching staffs instead you’re saving him on the bench so he can face Blake Snell next week. That isn’t good for the player! 

Again it would be one thing if Jordan Westburg was blocking Mayo from playing time but that isn’t the case, we’re getting Emmanuel Rivera and Nick Maton at bats over Mayo and yeah Rivera has played better than Mayo (that’s not a high bar to clear Mayo’s OPS+ is -10 (I didn’t even know OPS+ could go that low)) but he’s not playing so much better that you need to bury your top prospect and we’ve been losing most games no matter which of the 2 have been in the lineup so it’s not like we can say “yeah we couldn’t play Mayo because Rivera was the difference between between keeping pace with the Yankees and playing like on of the worst teams in the league” so we have nothing to show for how little we played Mayo. 

The Bullpen 

I hesitate to include the bullpen because part of me feels like Hyde was dealt something of a losing hand having to replace Felix Bautista with Craig Kimbrel as well as some of the other injuries that the O’s bullpen experienced but every bullpen deals with injuries because that’s what happens when you tell guys their only chance to be in the big leagues is to throw as hard as they can on every single pitch. 

Anyway Hyde loves to bring pitchers in with one out to get in an inning and then not have them pitch the next inning which is a strange things to do and it makes it so the O’s burn through their bullpen during a game and then if things don’t go exactly according to plan that’s how you get Keegan Akin in the bottom of the 10th. 

Another issue Hyde has is his over reliance on the lefty righty matchups. This over reliance on matchups causes Hyde to pull good pitchers too early and he will occasionally run into the trap of pitching a lefty vs a guy who hits lefties better than righties and paying the price. Both of these things hurt the team especially since Hyde is so consistent that other managers can manipulate him into taking his best relievers out of the game by making the corresponding pinch hitting move. (I’ve also seen this with pitchers too where the other team has a struggling lefty on the mound and righty warming up in the bullpen and Hyde predictably pinch hits for someone like O’Hearn and then the other team gets to bring in their righty out of the bullpen. Right then you are doing what the opposing team wants you to do, they are praying you pinch hit for a good hitter with a worse hitter so that they can go to their bullpen). 

Like I said at the start of this section sometimes you just don’t have the dudes so I won’t fault Hyde for games where he is stuck with Cionel Perez as his best arm available but he does just have these same traps he gets stuck in quite routinely and it has cost the Orioles games.  

Less Fair Criticisms

The Locker room 

I think that managing the emotional well being of the team is actually the most important part of being a manager. Good managers have a feel for the guys in their clubhouse, they are good communicators that can get guys to buy into roles and they are good motivators who can appeal to individuals and large groups of players. In the past I have thought that I didn’t love the lineup and bullpen decisions but it seemed like the guys were feeling good and competing hard so I figured Hyde was doing a good job at the stuff that we as fans can’t really see. This year the vibes around the team are much worse so does that mean Hyde is not doing a bad job behind the scenes? 

It’s hard to tell because the simplest explanation is that when teams win a lot they are happy and when teams lose a lot they are unhappy. It would be weird if during this really tough stretch the O’s were grinning ear to ear while the Tigers beat the brakes off them. 

The O’s aren’t hitting well and because they aren’t hitting well they aren’t winning games and because they aren’t winning games they aren’t a happy team. Is it Brandon Hyde’s fault that Adley Rutshman went from the best catcher in Baseball to worse than James McCann? 

These guys play 162 games a year and Brandon Hyde can’t give a ra-ra speech before each game. I still see plenty of effort on defense and running the bases, I haven’t heard any embarrassing sound bites like what you usually hear around the league when a team is sick of their manager. 

I’m not posing these rhetorical questions as an own towards people that want to fire Hyde, I am open to the possibility that he really has lost the locker room I just don’t know how anyone outside of the locker room would know that. 

Not Standing up for his guys 

This is kind of a chronically online brain criticism but I sometimes agree with it so I’m going to include it: Hyde doesn’t yell at the umpires enough. Over the course of the season the umpires have not been kind to the Orioles, there may be reasons for this including that the O’s catchers have not been good framing the ball and that the Orioles young hitters tend to be very patient at the plate and that leads to bad strike calls but no matter the reason Brandon Hyde does not get out of the dug out to set the Umps straight very often. 

Hyde has 4 ejections this season which is actually among the league leaders but only 2 of these were arguing balls and strikes (one was inciting a fight vs the Yankees and the other was him disputing a replay) which is just not very much considering how often the O’s get wrung up on bad 3rd strike calls. This was especially apparent during Jackson Holliday’s first call up when he was getting punched out on balls well out of the zone almost every game which was only making him struggle that much worse and the camera would just cut to Hyde doing his 1000 mile stare and you want to shake him and push him up the dugout steps. 

Again this is a dumb criticism but I find myself thinking it all the time, this isn’t limited to just umps I was also disappointed when the Yankees blatantly threw at Gunnar and Hyde just kind of stared at them although he did redeem himself a little by charging the dugout when they hit Kjerstad so there’s that. 

This all boils down to wanting to see more fire from the manager when the team is getting screwed but honestly this could be a real be careful what you wish for deal because if we fired Hyde and got a manager that was always barking at the umps I don’t know how long it would be before I would write something like “enough with the performative outrage just coach the team” 

Is Hyde Coaching for his job this postseason?

Last year the O’s got blown out of the water in the playoffs. They didn’t look ready for the moment, there was a weird miscommunication about a hit and run that lead the an out on the bases in the 9th inning, he tried to use Jacob Webb in 2 high leverage moments and he gave up home runs in both of them and it was an embarrassing end to an otherwise great season. 

This season has been a long drawn out struggle after a hot first month and half and the team hasn’t been able to get any sort of momentum at any point in the second half of the season. Even moments that supposedly could have sparked the team like Santander’s grand slam against the Astros or Santander’s walk off homer vs the Giants (I’m noticing a theme here) have not energized the team into any sort of winning streak and like I mentioned to open the blog the Orioles have stumbled down the stretch and fumbled the division away to a Yankee team that was begging the Orioles to be back to back AL East Champs. 

It may be foolish to base whether or not Hyde will be the manager on what could be a 3-8 game sample size in the playoffs but I don’t think he deserves to be fired “no matter what happens” so I’d be willing to see how this playoff run goes and make the decision based on that. If there is no difference from last year and the team is shook and Hyde makes inexplicable bullpen decisions then that’s that good luck Cincinnati, but if there is growth and the team looks better than last year then welcome back Brandon Hyde. 

Part of the problem is that I don’t know who the O’s could hire that would make it so I wouldn’t also end up wanting them fired. Yes I outlined a lot of stuff that I feel like it’s fair to criticize Hyde for but there is no perfect manager just waiting in the wings that would set the lineup just the way I want it and play the young guys the the perfect amount to develop them while not losing games because of it and make all the right moves in the bullpen and yell at the umps the exact right amount and has this glowing aura that makes it so the whole locker room loves him and plays hard because if it. 

It’s a real “better the devil you know” situation, it is very possible we could get a new manager and they could be worse which is scary to think about but I don’t think you can make these decisions out of fear. 

Anyway I hope I’m not being too unfair to Brandon Hyde. I don’t think he is a bad manager but sometimes a team needs a new voice and this Orioles team has been in a rut for long enough that I think it will take a new voice to get them out. I joked a few paragraphs ago that Hyde should go take over in Cincinnati and I do actually think he’d be a really good fit on a young team that needs to make that next step towards contending, I bet if he went there and got them in the playoffs his first season he’d be a strong contender for a second manager of the year.