The Baltimore Orioles fired manager Brandon Hyde on Saturday after an awful start to the season, one that is widely considered to be the most disappointing start to 2025 by any team in MLB.
While no manager gets fired over the result of one game, Hyde’s final contest at the helm — a 4-3 loss on Friday at home against the Nationals — certainly fits the genre of defeat that serves as the final straw for a skipper on the hot seat. After Nationals starter MacKenzie Gore departed in the fourth, Baltimore mustered just one unearned run against a Washington bullpen that entered the evening with a 6.75 ERA, 29th in MLB. Facing another struggling team that had lost eight of its previous nine games, the Orioles stranded 15 runners and failed to preserve a 3-2 lead through seven innings.
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With two outs and a base open in the top of the eighth, Orioles lefty reliever Keegan Akin went at Nationals slugger James Wood and paid the price, as Wood torched a center-cut fastball over the left-center-field wall for a game-tying home run. With two outs in the top of the ninth, Washington took the lead when Baltimore closer Felix Bautista failed to cover first base in time on a Nasim Nunez chopper to the right side, allowing Jose Tena to come around from second. In the bottom of the ninth, a Jackson Holliday leadoff single was immediately squandered when Holliday got caught stealing, and Cedric Mullins watched strike three down the middle, a rally-killing double-whammy that spelled certain doom for Baltimore.
With the loss, Baltimore fell to 15-28, the fourth-worst record in baseball. Its minus-75 run differential ranks 29th in the sport, ahead of only the historically horrific Rockies.
Hyde’s dismissal comes less than a week after the Rockies let go of Bud Black and two weeks removed from Pittsburgh parting ways with Derek Shelton, making the first time since 2002 that three MLB managers were fired before the start of June. But Hyde represents a sharp contrast to the circumstances that resulted in Black’s and Shelton’s firings. Colorado and Pittsburgh got off to predictably poor starts, based on both organizations’ troubling track records of woeful performance and rosters that were objectively undermanned. For those two teams, the outcome was hardly a shock, given the reality that when bad teams are bad for long enough, the manager usually gets fired.
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In the case of Hyde and Baltimore, we’ve arrived at the breakup via a decidedly…