A good manager might only be worth a handful of games each season.
That’s what MLB general managers, who have amassed considerable power in the last decade and put the owners in their back pockets, would have you believe. And perhaps they are even right. Even so, makes you wonder how much a bad skipper coupled with a shoddy general manager cost a team in victories each season. And what a quality combination would be truly worth.
Unfortunately for Orioles fans, that’s precisely what’s transpiring in Baltimore. And every single loss Craig Albernaz has a major in makes it even more difficult to dig out this hole (38-44).
An already heavily limited roster – where the pieces don’t fit and the redundancies are staggering and the lack of fundamental acumen is sweeping – in the hands of a skipper who has never done the job before is the perfect coupling for improbable loss after unbelievable loss. It’s part how a baseball team its architect crowed would compete to beat the Yankees for the AL East title s in fact incapable of seizing any real momentum (haven’t won more than three in a row now 82 games into another vexing campaign).
What no one could debate is that at this point in his career Craig Albernaz is not a good MLB manager. He may not even be worthy of being an MLB manager (consider the guy who hired him, Mike Elias, and his track record doing anything the last four years). And with a team as devoid of baseball IQ and lacking quality defenders and with a bullpen that on paper looked incredibly flimsy, this group – lacking maturity and fortitude as this rebuild has crumbled – screamed out for a proven guiding voice.
More On-The-Job Training
Whatever Albernaz might become, knowing he would be dealt a brutal hand by Elias and his minions making roster decisions, another learn-on-the-job type was Elias spitting in the fans faces again – he always knows better than you, silly, you didn’t go to Yale -and this rookie has sooooo much still to learn.
Albernaz has displayed no initial feel for telling the difference between a languishing starter and one hitting a groove – HYPER WED; who lacks foresight to know which relievers are bottoming out and need to be moved down the pecking order – HYPER NUNES . Watching Trey Gibson start to feel himself on the mound for the first time in his brief rookie campaign, and watching the Angels uncomfortable at bats against him and thinking, ‘Can’t wait to go to my garbage bullpen in the fifth to prove to my boss how smart I am,’” ain’t gonna cut it.
Watching his velo tick up and with the kid on just 66 pitches (storming through the fourth with two strikeouts and a groundout on nine pitches), and falling prey to an instinct to overmanage this early in his skipper career, that’s a bad sign, folks. Gravitating to navigating a pen that is absolutely a weakness – before seeing what Gibson could do feeling confident at this level for the first time – is the kind of joyless, mindless anti-baseball that Elias subscribes to.
(I’m not sure which version of pissed off Jim Palmer I enjoyed more as this all unfolded Wednesday – the one who called it realtime in the 5th, the one who referred back to it as we headed to extra innings realizing who was left in the pen or the one who looked like he wanted to punch the pressbox in disgust in the post-game as he had to relive the ridiculous overthinking by a manager clearly over his head).
No wonder Elias was attracted to this guy.
It Wasn;t A Reak Managerial Search
We all knew Elias would never even entertain the prosect of a powerful manager with a resume far better than Elias’s (or any resume at all). We all knew a skipper with personnel chops and the ability to pushback on Mike’s nonsense was a nonstarter.
It doesn’t make it any less wrong. It doesn’t make this mess any more palatable. It doesn’t mean that the manager isn’t a significant part of the problem.
Their alleged best players aren’t getting better, the one kid who was their biggest breakthrough, by far, they couldn’t wait to publicly shame before he turned 22, and Pete Alonso alone wasn’t able to turn this into a winning clubhouse.
The pressure mounts each series with this franchise looking every bit like a pretender for the third straight year and them chasing the standings since April. Albernaz and these players keep cracking. I wouldn’t expect anything else as this summer heats up.
He doesn’t really know what he’s doing yet. And his boss still has no clue nine years into his regime.
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