The Baltimore Orioles have their next manager.

The Orioles are finalizing a deal to hire Craig Albernaz as their manager, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan. He will replace Brandon Hyde, who was fired in May in the midst of his seventh season leading the franchise.

Albernaz, 42, was one of the bigger names available for a manager job throughout the league this cycle. He most recently worked as an associate manager with the Cleveland Guardians, and helped guide the organization to back-to-back postseason appearances. They went 88-74 this past season, but fell in the first round of the playoffs. Albernaz has also spent time in the San Francisco Giants organization as a bullpen coach and hitting instructor. This will mark his first managerial job in Major League Baseball.

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Albernaz played in the minor leagues himself, too, and reached the Tampa Bay Rays’ Triple-A affiliate at his peak.

The Orioles parted with Hyde earlier this season after they started just 15-28, a significant regression from the team that racked up 101 wins during the 2023 campaign and 91 wins last year. Hyde even was named AL Manager of the Year in 2023. They ended up finishing 75-87, which was their worst record since the 2021 campaign, under interim manager Tony Mansolino. He was in the running for the open job — team president Mike Elias said that he was “a real candidate” in September — but the team opted to go a different direction.

With the Orioles making a move, there are now just five teams in the league — the San Diego Padres, Minnesota Twins, Atlanta Braves, Colorado Rockies and Washington Nationals — without a manager.

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The Orioles have significant questions entering next season. The team posted one of the worst ERAs in the American League last summer, several big names struggled offensively and they will likely lose some rotation players like Zach Eflin and Tomoyuki Sugano in free agency. They struggled to find any sort of consistency, either, and ended up finishing just one game above .500 under Mansolino’s watch. It was by all accounts a disappointing season.

“When you have a season that misses the mark by this much, there’s a lot on the list of what went wrong,” Elias said last month, via The Associated Press.

But the Orioles have their next manager in place. That’s the first step in solving everything else and making what would be their first truly deep postseason run in more than a decade.