For the last few seasons, the Baltimore Orioles have been the envy of MLB scouting departments. A steady parade of some of the top prospects in the minor leagues have been working their way through the Orioles farm system. That was the prize for a stretch of unabashed tanking that tried Baltimore fans’ patience. In the five years from 2017 to 2021, the O’s finished last four times and lost 100 games three times. And that stretch included the COVID season that reduced the schedule to 60 games, or things could have been even worse.
Now, the prospects have reached the Major Leagues, and the team held on to almost all of them, rather than trading some for veteran stars to try to make a deep postseason run. However, Orioles fans are beginning to lose patience again. The team won the division in 2023 and made the playoffs in back-to-back years. Just when it seemed like the years of suffering were about to pay off, Baltimore took a huge step back last year, finishing last and losing 87 games.
All Stars Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschmann, the first two Orioles prospects to make it to Baltimore, seemed to regress last season and fans are wondering if the team needs to move on from what looked like a generational crop of young players.
Fortunately, the new Baltimore manager knows the value of patience. Craig Albernaz played nine minor league seasons for 16 different minor league teams. He’s one of only two Durham Bulls players to spend five different years with the team and never make the Major Leagues. (Brooks Badeaux is the other.)
All that time. All those bus rides. All those cities, and what does Albernaz have to show for it? 380 minor league games and 1,063 at bats. That’s an average of 43 games and 118 at bats a year.
By way of comparison, in the last two years with Baltimore, Henderson has played 313 games and gotten 1207 at bats.
Albernaz was a backup catcher, and a wildly popular one with both fans and teammates, due to an upbeat attitude and a thick New England accent that’s always ready with a joke or taunt. On the first day of Orioles spring training, he declared that his goal was to “try to touch all the players and kind of see what’s going on.”
After nine years of a lot of sitting the bench and watching, Albernaz had become a manager in waiting, with a deep knowledge of the game, and the personalities of the guys who play it. He got his first minor league managing job in 2017, three years after hanging it up as a player. In 2018, he was Manager of the Year in the Double-A Midwest League. In 2020, he got his first call to the big leagues, serving as a coach on the San Francisco Giants staff before moving to Cleveland, where he spent the last two years as bench coach and associate manager under manager Stephen Vogt, a former teammate with the Bulls.
If anyone has paid his dues, it’s Albernaz.
“He seems like he’s done this before,” said Orioles GM Mike Elias. “I don’t sense any nervousness or apprehension about this being his first camp with him as a manager. I think he’s fully ready and prepared. He’s been really thoughtful about it. I think that he and the players are going to click really well. They already have. I think he’s gonna be great. I think it’s just about learning the players, learning the roster, seeing what happens here in camp. I think he’s going to be a really positive factor for us.”
If anyone can get the wayward prospects back on track for the stardom that seemed predestined for them not long ago, it may be the guy that knows nothing in the game is guaranteed.
“We always talk about development and, you know, it’s very process oriented,” Albernaz said. “You know, development’s messy, right? It’s not a linear track development, but I think it’s everything in this game is predicated on results. It is what it is, and especially for players, right? Players really gravitate to the results, because that’s what they’ve known their whole life. … Every player is different. They learn at different rates. And so for us, you have to be able to find those avenues for our guys.”
Albernaz plans to lean heavily on what he learned in the Rays organization, which helped him win two International League titles in his five years in Durham, and another when he returned to the team as a coach in 2017.
“It was everything,” he said of his years with the Rays organization. “It’s in my foundation, in my upbringing. It’s something I talk about all the time: just how the organization took time—w when I was a player there, for sure—but as a staff member, how they helped develop me to even be the position and be in this seat. And I’m just a byproduct of everyone who I’ve come across and who has impacted me. So look across the game. There’s a lot of Rays personnel dispersed everywhere, and I was just very fortunate to be in the organization and learning from a lot of great people.”
