Baltimore Orioles: Brandon Hyde’s dilemma when trying to score

The new Baltimore Orioles manager tries to out-hustle the Yankees

Imagine you are new Baltimore Orioles manager Brandon Hyde. Hired away from a comfortable tenure as bench coach for Joe Maddon in Chicago, you’re running a team that lost 115 games last year. Except that’s not really the team you’re running because two-thirds of your batting order wasn’t even on the team before last August.

You open the season at Yankee Stadium against a club that hit 267 home runs last season and expects to hit even more than year. Your starting lineup combined last year to hit 76. Your opponents averaged more runs per game last year than any club that did not win the World Series.

They did reach post-season play; you missed out by 53 games.

In that scenario, can you develop a strategy for winning?

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Hyde believed he could…and he discussed it prior to the game with Oriole media. It involved what he termed “aggressive mistakes,” baseball-speak for hustling, even if to a fault. The touchpoints included base-stealing, a pro-active attitude toward batter-pitcher confrontations and an unusual approach to lineup construction.

Of those touchpoints, Hyde’s opening day lineup construction was possibly the most revolutionary. Stereotypically his most obvious middle-of-the-order bat was Chris Davis, his first baseman. Davis is a legacy of the previous administration – and a costly one, with four $23 million seasons remaining on his contract – who hit 16 home runs in 2018.

But he is also infamous for his inability to make regular contact, a skill that is vital for a team plotting an “aggressive” offensive strategy. Davis fanned 192 times in 2018, nearly 40 percent of his at bats. It was not an aberration; his whiff percentage since 2015 is 39.4 percent. Faced with that reality, Hyde dropped Davis all the way to the seventh spot in the Orioles’ order where, presumably, his contact issues would be less likely to get in the way of any rallies the Orioles happened to fashion.

In the 3-4-5 power slots, Hyde continued his break with tradition, calling on Jonathan Villar, Trey Mancini and Rio Ruiz. Villar is a journeyman obtained from Milwaukee at last year’s trading deadline who – when right – can be a stolen base threat. He swiped 62 of them in 2016 and 35 last year, most after coming over to Baltimore. But he has never been mistaken for either a power guy or a run-producer. His high RBI total is 63 in 2016, which was also the last time he slugged better than .400.

Mancini, operating in the four slot, lead the O’s last year with 24 home runs and 58 RBIs. As for Ruiz, feel free to speculate. The Orioles acquired him on waivers from Atlanta, where in 15 major league plate appearances last season he produced one hit, a single. He hit nine home runs in 541 plate appearances at AAA.

Hyde’s plan, obviously, wasn’t to try to out-slug the Yankees – that would be a fool’s chore – but to annoy them to death. Both Villar and new leadoff man Cedric Mullins are switch-hitters and both — along with No. 2 hitter Dwight Smith Jr. – have speed. Combining their major and minor league travels, Mullins, Smith and Villar succeeded on a combined 65 of 74 steal attempts in 2018.

Baltimore Orioles

The base-stealing game is an interesting strategical approach that includes many pluses illustrated by some of the great speed teams of the past. The 1980s Cardinals, with Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Ozzie Smith, Tom Herr, Terry Pendleton and Lonnie Smith come to mind. In 1985 the Cardinals stole 314 bases on their way to the National League pennant. At its best, it can demote opponents from the pennant race to the psycho ward.

It has, however, almost been universally abandoned these days in favor of the power approach. Last year, nearly two-thirds of major league teams hit at least twice as many home runs as their stolen base totals, and no team has had more stolen bases than home runs since the 2014 Kansas City Royals.

There are two reasons for this. The first is the mounting evidence that home runs are a lot more efficient producers of runs than stolen bases. The second is that, as a strategy, anyway, stolen bases are highly situation-dependent. You can’t steal a base unless you can first reach base, and it only makes sense to run in certain fairly narrow game situations.

Hyde’s “aggressive mistakes” strategy ran afoul of these realities at Yankee Stadium Thursday.
The Orioles put a baserunner in motion exactly once. That occurred in what was virtually a prototype situation in the first inning.

After Yankee starter Masahiro Tanaka retired Mullins and Smith, Villar lined a base hit into right field. Mancini strikes out nearly 25 percent of the time, but Villar’s base-stealing success rate – 78 percent for his career and 88 percent last year – largely obviates any contact concerns. With an 0-2 count, Hyde unleashed Villar … and Mancini fouled the pitch off. That was Hyde’s one shot. On the next pitch, Mancini singled up the middle, but the ball struck Villar who was ruled out, ending the inning.

That’s when the second strategic limitation tying Hyde’s hands surfaced. You can’t run – at least not effectively – when behind by more than a run or two, and the Baltimore pitching staff is notorious for putting its offense in deep holes.

Andrew Cashner, coming off a 5-14 season and 5.29 ERA, allowed one-out, opposite field singles to Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, then center-cut a 3-1 slider to Luke Voit, who teleported into the monuments.

Like that, the Yanks led 3-0 and Hyde’s “aggressive mistakes” strategy had been rendered inoperative for the day.

New York never led by less and eventually won 7-2.

This does not mean that Hyde’s strategy of aggressiveness is a bad one. If you lack power – and the Orioles do lack power – your offensive options are functionally limited, so it probably makes sense to at least try to make things happen. Beyond that, it frequently makes sense to zig while the rest of the world is zagging, and these days everybody is doing power. So why not be the exception.

The key, however, is to develop the mound depth that makes a running game feasible. The Baltimore Orioles had a 5.18 team ERA last season, and their projected 2019 rotation – Dylan Bundy, Cashner, Alex Cobb, David Hess, and Mike Wright — features nobody with an ERA below Hess’s 4.88 last season.
The Orioles can run…but they can’t hide from that reality.