The Orioles announced their choice for their new manager this week, bringing in Craig Albernaz, who they plucked from being a top lieutenant on the coaching staff of the Cleveland Guardians. Albernaz won’t be officially introduced in a press conference until next week. The one clip we’ve seen of him speaking so far
is enough to realize that all of the jokes about the intensity of his Massachusetts accent were not exaggerated.In this week’s poll, I asked fans to give a grade to the Albernaz hire.
A number of folks commented and declined to make a choice, since it will only be in hindsight that we can know if it was a good hire or not. While true, this point of view is boring. I will tell you from my long experience of doing this that you will never say anything interesting if you’re worried about looking dumb later because you were wrong. Thank you to those who were willing to have an opinion at this juncture. Here’s how the results came in:
Overall, it’s an optimistic set of responses, which I will admit surprised me based on the strength of some responses who were disappointed that the Orioles chose someone without any big league managing experience.
I think for anyone who wasn’t hung up on previous experience as being a must, there’s a lot to like in the hire, and that showed up in the results. That’s 75% who voted for B or better on the grade, an overwhelmingly-positive result. I do think to some degree a grade of B is the default cautiously optimistic answer for people who want to be excited but also know that no games have been played yet. I’d say that’s fair.
Albernaz is going to have his work cut out for him around here. Although he’s not inheriting as hopeless of a situation as his predecessor Brandon Hyde did seven years ago, there was a lot of disappointment and underachievement from the core group of Orioles position players this year and Albernaz will probably be judged in substantial part on how much better that goes in the future. The quality of the pitching staff that Mike Elias assembles for him will, obviously, be another key factor.
All that we know so far is that at least two-thirds of the hitting coaches will not be returning to next year’s staff. The two assistant hitting coaches from 2025, Sherman Johnson and Tommy Joseph, are reportedly not going to be back. With how things went this year, some changes had to be made.
