Fair or not, the manager often takes the heat for underachievement.
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The Orioles are not getting it done so far in the 2025 season. With 15 games played, the team is sitting on a 6-9 record, which works out to a 65-win pace over a full season. They have yet to even win consecutive games. Things aren’t hopeless yet because it’s still early in the season and every one of the O’s division rivals is dealing with struggles of their own. Things also aren’t fun yet either.
Everyone has their own idea for who deserves to be blamed and how to portion out the blame for what’s going on. Ultimately, it’s the players who have to get things done, and it was general manager Mike Elias who assembled the roster of players who, so far, are not getting it done. When it comes to the starting rotation, where the flaw was obvious and the team’s efforts to address it did not seem to be enough, that’s particularly frustrating.
Yet a lot of the blame comes back around to the manager as well. “You can’t fire all of the players,” as the cliche goes. Fair or not to Brandon Hyde or any manager, if a team’s not getting stuff done in the middle of a season, and there are no immediate personnel changes to be made, that’s often the next lever to pull to try to get things going in a different direction. Antsy fans are often the most interested in having that lever be pulled.
The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal recently weighed in on Hyde as he wrote about nine managers who could find their jobs in jeopardy as this year plays out:
Elias stuck with Hyde when the team began to turn around rather than hire a more proven veteran type. The bond between the two remains close … while the firings of three coaches at the end of last season could be interpreted as a warning shot to Hyde, Elias surely knows that the responsibility for his team’s shortcomings falls more on him than his manager. … Zack Britton’s younger brother, Buck, managed many of the Orioles’ younger players at Triple-A the past three years. He could ultimately replace Hyde, but Elias would be foolish to rush into such a move, particularly when the Orioles pitching, hitting, and bench coaches all have less than two years of experience in their current roles.
That’s a good case for why the Orioles will stay the course at least for the rest of this season. There are already plenty of people who reject it, however, and if the team continues to muddle along below .500 or slips farther back in the standings, that will certainly increase the volume of fans calling for Hyde’s firing and possibly lead Elias to re-evaluate the situation as well. What do you think will happen?