Reports hit the media on Sunday night that the Orioles have made their choice for hiring their next manager, bringing in Guardians coach Craig Albernaz to try to help get this club going back in a good direction again.

Unless you are a sick freak who maintains a constant awareness of the coaching staffs of the other 29 MLB teams, you probably did not have any idea of who Albernaz was before this year’s round of managerial openings across the league. Anyone who did pay attention to the names thrown around as likely hires this time around probably heard about Albernaz then.

Playing and coaching experience

The Massachusetts native Albernaz is yet another example of the marginal catcher-to-MLB manager pipeline. Albernaz went undrafted out of college and signed with what was then still the Devil Rays organization for the 2006 season. He climbed from the now-defunct Appalachian League to Triple-A by the 2009 season, but never made it to the majors because he could not hit, even for a backup catcher. He hung around in the pros through the 2014 season, nine minor league years in all, before transitioning into the coaching side of the game.

Albernaz went back to the Rays to work as a minor league coach. He spent the next five seasons across a variety of different levels and in a variety of different roles, including one as a Triple-A manager in 2018. This was enough to generate some interest from big league teams, and he was hired as bullpen/catching coach with the Giants from 2020-23. He went to serve as the bench coach of the Guardians for the 2024 season and his title was changed to associate manager for 2025.

If you find any national publication’s article about the hire, they will probably mention that this is one of the most well-regarded young coaches in the game right now. (Young means that he turns 43 later this week. Congratulations to everyone who keeps “I am younger than the Orioles manager” going for a little while longer.) I think on some level it’s easy to dismiss that kind of thing as fluff, but let me tell you, there wasn’t such a chorus of people writing that about Brandon Hyde when the Orioles hired him seven years ago.

The Athletic notes the friendship between Albernaz and Guardians manager Stephen Vogt, himself the product of the catcher-to-manager pipeline. This anecdote from Vogt certainly suggests a drive that compares favorably to every Orioles fan’s reference point for a great manager, Earl Weaver:

(In the minor leagues, Vogt and Albernaz) fantasized about what buttons they would push if they were the manager. (Now,) Albernaz spends his afternoons thinking up every possible scenario that might arise during a game so Vogt isn’t caught unprepared. Vogt dubbed him “the hardest-working person in baseball,” an “Energizer Bunny” who stays up “all hours of the night diving into one small thing if it can help one of our players get a tick better.”

Another thing that comes up with talking about Albernaz is his strength in forging relationships with players and with other people in the organization. This time a year ago, Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti was bracing for the possibility of Albernaz leaping to another team to take up a manager job, and when he did not, he said this:

“He’s endeared himself to so many people in such a short time. I think about how he didn’t have many preexisting relationships coming in, and he’s built so many great relationships across the organization.”

It is not a flashy aspect of visiting, nor particularly is it a visible aspect of managing to fans at all, but getting along with the front office above you and with the players who you are managing is a crucial thing. It’s not going to be up to Albernaz to solve the problems that need to be addressed by external additions to the organization. What he will have to do is get the young core of Orioles players, who as a group stopped performing at their demonstrated best around the All-Star break last year, going in a good direction again, individually and collectively.

We heard some of this kind of stuff from and about Hyde when he was hired at the outset of the rebuilding process. I remember watching Hyde’s introductory press conference, where he said he thought his biggest strength was building relationships so he can have honest conversations with players, and kind of scoffing about that, like, who cares? As Hyde managed to bridge the gap between several truly tanking years and the team being good again, I came around to believing that was a quiet skill he was really good at. Or at least good at it until it seemed to stop working.

Albernaz waited for the right job for him

Antonetti’s quote above was in response to Albernaz taking himself out of consideration for open managerial spots with both the Marlins and White Sox last offseason. This is a guy who believed in himself enough to not snatch up the first available opening, confident that he would get another chance where he wouldn’t just have to be the guy who takes all of the beatings of a rebuilding team.

Ultimately, this will mean nothing. The team will either win with him here or it won’t. At least for thinking about it initially, though, I am happy with the idea that the Orioles situation was good enough to entice Albernaz to take this job rather than his feeling like it’s a dysfunctional mess that he should stay away from. It’s nice to be the first choice of a well-regarded free agent for once.

Lots of jokes about his accent

Albernaz hails from Fall River, Massachusetts, which my wife immediately pointed out was the home of Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of the 1892 killings of her father and stepmother. The Massachusetts part is important because Albernaz talks like the joking caricature in your head of someone from the Boston area, and seemingly everyone around him busts on him about it regularly.

The Baltimore Banner highlighted an anecdote from Albernaz’s time as a coach with the Giants where the team programmed his voice into its PitchCom system in spring training. Albernaz is in on the joke, as MLB.com noted when he interviewed with the Guardians for their manager opening – that ultimately went to Vogt – the first thing asked by the panel was to give a fake spring training speech to an imagined clubhouse of players. Before even beginning the speech, Albernaz jokingly asked for an interpreter to be brought in.

The Orioles may not announce this for a few days still, because, as MASN’s Roch Kubatko reminds us, “teams are discouraged from revealing major moves on days that World Series games are played.” If you have never encountered discussion of this “unwritten rule” before now, it probably sounds ridiculous. That’s largely because it is ridiculous.

It is real, though, and it comes up every now and again. A number of years ago now, Alex Rodriguez infamously announced a decision to opt out of his contract with the Yankees while the World Series was going on, and this generated some tut-tutting from some people. Many of those same people are still around in baseball media to jump on a similar “faux pas.”

Since we know the World Series will go at least five games, that could mean that news of the hire will wait until the next off day on Thursday. That would be October 30, which just so happens to be Albernaz’s birthday. Wouldn’t be a bad present.