Friday night, he was the Baltimore Orioles’ third base coach and infield instructor, a minor league lifer who’d earned his stripes on the major league staff the past four seasons. Saturday morning, he was thrust into the manager’s seat when the man who gave him a big-league shot, Brandon Hyde, was fired amid a 15-28 start.
By Sunday morning, he was holding his first media briefing and aiming to contextualize it all.
‘This is very different than what I was doing. I had a nice little silo that I worked in, and it was comfortable,’ says Mansolino. ‘This is about as uncomfortable as it gets right now.’
A few hours later, Mansolino learned it can always, always get more uncomfortable.
For the second consecutive game in the post-Hyde era, the Orioles trailed their quasi-rival Washington Nationals by seven runs after just two innings. Both games, the Orioles trailed before recording an out, with CJ Abrams ripping Sunday’s first pitch from Baltimore ace Zach Eflin over Camden Yards’ right field wall.
Abrams would homer his next at-bat, and Dylan Crews hit a three-run homer, and a lively crowd on Little League day was soon lulled into the catatonic stupor that just may accompany Baltimore’s final 117 games of the season.
If the firing of Hyde – who endured the club’s tanking and survived to guide it to a 101-win season and two playoff berths – was supposed to invigorate a clearly underperforming club, it’s initially had the opposite effect.
The Orioles were swept at home by the Nationals, who prevailed 10-4 on Sunday, for the first time since 2018, when they lost a franchise-record 115 games that inspired this rebuild that only recently went sideways, resulting in Hyde’s firing.
For a team widely expected to make the playoffs a third consecutive season, and a young core that seems to be regressing rather than peaking, there’s seemingly no bottom.
‘I don’t think there’s really any words I can tell you,’ says Eflin after withstanding the early barrage to pitch into the sixth inning. ‘I mean, it’s frustrating. We’re not necessarily having fun right now.’
And for a young club playing for a different manager for the first time, it might take some adjustments.
A new sensation
The Orioles looked relatively shell-shocked in the aftermath of Hyde’s Saturday firing. Mansolino, 42, who has four seasons of minor league managerial experience, does not expect that to disappear overnight.
‘This is tough. This is emotional. There’s a lot of emotions,’ says Manosolino. ‘For a lot of our guys, for us as coaches. I mean, this was a tough pill to swallow in a lot of ways.
‘So, we have to say that, but we also have to recognize this is not going to be as linear as we want.’
With that, Mansolino anticipates the seven-game trip that begins Monday at Milwaukee will allow space after a chaotic weekend to pull individuals aside and take their emotional temperature.
‘This is going to linger for a little bit,’ he says, ‘and we got to do the best we can to move forward and try to win some games.’
All this is new for the Orioles’ core. They sent five players to the All-Star Game last season, with Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman and Jordan Westburg representing the homegrown core of the rebuild.
Henderson missed the start of the season with an oblique injury, one of many nicks that have waylaid the club so far. He had a predictably uneven beginning to the season but now has reached base in 21 of his past 23 games.
He slammed his seventh homer Sunday, then reflected on this new sensation for the group.
‘It’s definitely different,’ says Henderson. ‘This is my first change in manager, so it is a little bit different, but I have full faith in Manso and the surrounding staff, so we’ll see if we can get it turned around.’
That seems unlikely – at least, to the extent that the 15-30 Orioles reach .500, avoid a sell-off at the trade deadline and remain live dogs for their third consecutive playoff berth.
Still, it’s plenty early, though that means nothing if the team can’t pitch. Sunday, the club designated for assignment right-hander Kyle Gibson, one day after he created that 7-0 second-inning hole in the first game of the Mansolino era.
Eflin, their opening-day starter, won’t meet that fate after his Sunday foibles. But he also couldn’t stop whatever bleeding – on the scoreboard, and emotionally – that lingered from the Hyde dismissal.
‘This was tough yesterday. There’s no doubt,’ Mansolino said Sunday. ‘But as you walk into that clubhouse today, even yesterday, I don’t think that they’re feeling sorry for themselves. I don’t think that their compete has diminished in any ways.’