Baltimore Orioles Charge Manager Brandon Hyde $75.2million under•••• see more…..

READ RELATED ARTICLES HERE..

Stan ‘The Fan’ Charles: A Bad Night For Orioles Manager Brandon Hyde.

If you are a regular reader of this space, you know I am a pretty steadfast supporter of Orioles manager Brandon Hyde.

But last night’s 5-2 loss in Toronto harkened me back to fans asking me what I thought of Hyde during the rebuild years. My answer was always the same. “How are you going to judge this manager with Rio Ruiz, Pedro Severino and Dan Straily?”

Seriously, I always said we’d know more about Hyde when he had the players. In the second half of 2022, Hyde’s fourth season as skipper, the club played games that were kind of a trial run for when the Orioles were really going to be relevant.

Most of us pegged 2024 as the year when enough of the new guys would arrive and make an impact, but the team jumped ahead of that timetable. The Orioles had an amazing regular season in 2023, winning the AL East with 101 wins.

This season has been a tremendous mixed bag.

The sale of the club came together very quickly before the season started. The acquisition of a true ace in Corbin Burnes was immediately mitigated by the announcement in February that Kyle Bradish had a PRP injection and would be out for a while. Bradish, John Means and Tyler Wells all eventually went down with Tommy John surgery.

Three of Hyde’s core four — Cedric Mullins, Austin Hays and to some extent Ryan Mountcastle — struggled. There was the much ballyhooed debut of Jackson Holliday, which was an unmitigated disaster.

(There’s a positive ending to that story.) The trade deadline gave fans some hope for a strengthened team amid a pennant push. Then Jordan Westburg went down, forcing the Orioles into next-man-up mode.

That brings us to judgments on Hyde and his really bad night in Toronto.

In a bizarre situation, Grayson Rodriguez was supposed to have started the game. He was doing his usual pregame routine of long tossing in the outfield when didn’t feel quite right. The Orioles later described the injury as right lat/teres discomfort.

Albert Suárez was thrown into the ring and fired five shutout innings. With one out in the top of the sixth, Holliday delivered the Orioles’ first hit and a 1-0 lead in one swing with a home run to right-center off starter Chris Bassitt.

In the bottom of the sixth, Hyde went to right-handed reliever Burch Smith, who has been doing a solid job since joining the club. Here’s where Hyde’s night got strange. Smith retired George Springer and Joey Loperfido in routine fashion, but Vladimir Guererro Jr. lobbed a single to right field.

Hyde then rushed to the mound and brought in the most problematic pitcher on his staff at the moment, Gregory Soto, for a left-on-left matchup with Spencer Horwitz. Just two batters later, Alejandro Kirk slugged a three-run homer to give the Jays a 3-1 lead. Kirk had not homered since June 10. Three batters later, the score was 5-1.

All told, Soto allowed four hits and a walk. Three of the batters he faced were left-handed. I get trying to work a struggling pitcher back into a good groove, but that is done in blowout games, with at least a five- or six-run spread. It is not done with a 1-0 lead.

But as the Orioles often do, they rallied to make it interesting. In the top of the eighth, Bassitt was still pitching a one-hit gem when the Orioles got a leadoff walk from Adley Rutschman and back-to-back singles by Mountcastle and Eloy Jiménez, loading the bases with no outs.