Peter Schmuck: The Orioles will take off when Hyde can settle on a consistent lineup chemistry

It can’t be a whole lot of fun to be Brandon Hyde right now, because it’s tough to manage a major league team with both hands tied behind your back.

On one hand, he’s got a pitching staff that – once again – is dealing with key early-season injuries. It’s not as bad as the plague of arm problems that he dealt with in the first half of the 2024 season, but it’s starting to feel that way. The loss of Corbin Burnes to free agency combined with Grayson Rodriguez’s elbow-and-now-shoulder issues and Zach Eflin’s recent lat strain has left Hyde with just two healthy starters who have made it through six innings.

On the other hand, he is just now getting the real Gunnar Henderson back from his spring training setback and has had to spend the first three weeks of the season experimenting with his batting order to compensate for the two-month loss of Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg’s rocky start.

The result has been a number of lineup configurations, none of them – so far – creating the kind of sustainable offensive chemistry the Orioles featured the past two seasons. There have been loud bursts of offensive excitement interspersed among more frequent periods of frustrating non-production. That’s why it took until Thursday night’s 6-2 victory over the Cleveland Guardians for the Orioles to finally get back-to-back wins and take a series for the first time this season.

In Hyde’s perfect world, Henderson would be killing it in the leadoff spot, Tyler O’Neill would be making us forget Anthony Santander in the middle of the lineup, Ryan Mountcastle would be loving the closer fence in left field and Cedric Mullins would be the straw that stirs the drink. Mullins is holding up his end, but the rest has been slow to develop.

Henderson, who hit his first home run out of the second spot in the lineup Thursday night, appears ready to rock and there have been hopeful signs from fresh-faced regulars Jackson Holliday and Heston Kjerstad. But it’s too early to proclaim that the 8-10 Orioles have turned a competitive corner.

I’m confident that Hyde is more than qualified to put this puzzle together in a fashion that will keep his club from coming unraveled until it gets back to fuller strength. That said, he definitely had me scratching my head with his extremely right-handed lineup in the opener of the series against the Guardians.

Obviously, he was hoping to get Westburg going by putting him at the top of the order and wanted to give Henderson a different look in the cleanup spot. Still, I’m sure there were a lot of people wondering why the hottest hitter on the team (Mullins) was batting seventh among three bench guys who came into the game with a combined three hits in 37 at-bats this season.

It didn’t go well and it’s not a lineup you’re likely to see again, though Henderson and Mullins had productive games. New reserve outfielder Ramón Laureano was back in the lineup on Wednesday night and hit his first home run of the season, but it was only his second hit in 16 at-bats.

In a more perfect April, those bench players would be the glue that helps bind the offensive chemistry – and that may be the case at some point – but when new backup catcher Gary Sánchez is sitting on just two singles in 19 at-bats, it’s hard not to wax nostalgic for some of the magic moments provided by popular James McCann the past two seasons.

Okay, it isn’t even May yet and we need to give these guys a chance to settle into their roles. Nobody in Baltimore wants to see this Orioles team with a losing record and hopefully it won’t be in that unfortunate position for very long.

It doesn’t bode well that Rodriguez had to have an MRI on Thursday to determine the cause of shoulder soreness that surfaced as he appeared to be nearing a return next month from the elbow injury that sidelined him early in spring training.

We can only hope the ballclub that won the most regular-season games in the American League the past two years by overcoming this kind of adversity will be able to find that consistent offensive attack, and hope the club’s solid bullpen can buy the rotation some time to solidify.

I’ll try to keep the faith if you will.