Orioles manager takes full blame for nightmare series vs. Yankees

Craig Albernaz isn’t looking for excuses. After the Baltimore Orioles were swept by the New York Yankees, the rookie manager put the team’s inability to string together consistent baseball squarely on his own shoulders.

The sweep capped a jarring swing in form. Just a week earlier, the Orioles had taken three straight from the American League-leading Tampa Bay Rays, briefly holding sole possession of a wild-card spot. The Yankees series was the mirror image. “It was kind of opposite of the Tampa series we just played,” Albernaz said after the game, whose team is now on a losing streak of four games.

The numbers were bleak. Baltimore scored just five total runs across the series, all on solo home runs; Coby Mayo on Tuesday, Pete Alonso on Wednesday, and Dylan Beavers on Thursday. Former Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole shut them down in the finale, a 6-1 loss at Camden Yards, and the offense piled up double-digit strikeouts on back-to-back nights.

Pressed on why consistency has eluded his club all year, Albernaz didn’t deflect. “It’s something that, myself, I’ve been actively trying to problem-solve and put a finger on,” he said. “I’m the manager of the team and the guy in charge, and it’s my job to figure that out and I haven’t yet. And that’s on me. That’s the biggest thing.”

The 43-year-old tactician returned to that theme repeatedly, framing the team’s maddening inconsistency as his responsibility to solve. “We have to figure out how to keep our guys playing that consistent brand of baseball, and actively trying to figure that out,” he said. “Right now, it’s not, and like I said, that’s just on me.”

The frustration was compounded by wasted pitching. In the opener, Shane Baz struck out 10 over 6.1 innings but got no run support in a 3-1 defeat, a recurring theme for a lineup that has been, as one account put it, solo-homer or bust since June.

“We just couldn’t get the big hit, and when we needed to get runners on base, we had a tough time doing that,” Albernaz said. “And you can’t give any big-league team extra outs. That’s what hurt us today.”

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