Jon Meoli: Firing Brandon Hyde a year ago didn’t fix the Orioles’ problems. Craig Albernaz is making progress.

The firing of manager Brandon Hyde, a decision Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias made a year ago Sunday, was at its core about an underperforming 2025 team that started poorly and was only getting worse.

It was also an admission that whatever tailwind the Orioles enjoyed as they ascended out of their rebuild — when years of bad-on-purpose rosters yielded high draft picks who ultimately helped them become a contender — had faded. The good vibes and good baseball were gone. The arrow was no longer pointing up.

In many ways, it was the end of something. If only it were that simple.

So much feels different under new manager Craig Albernaz, who was hired in an offseason of unprecedented roster additions by Elias. Just as much feels the same as it ever was.

Albernaz’s problems are largely the same as Hyde’s: too few of the team’s homegrown bats hitting like the stars they were meant to be, too many injuries to key players and too much uncertainty in the starting rotation.

It’s hard not to focus on all that when it’s in front of us on a nightly basis, yet those are the areas where you can dig in and demonstrate where things have changed under Albernaz for the better, to say nothing of the overall culture change he’s brought.

We aren’t far enough removed from watching this team tumble off the cliff to be OK with it standing so close to it again, but we need to acknowledge it is on sturdier ground. People with the team believe the environment and clubhouse culture are markedly better than last year.

Albernaz has talked up the Orioles’ homegrown talent since the moment he took this job, and he and his staff can point to the elite catching duo of Adley Rutschman and Samuel Basallo as early success stories, albeit in different manners.

Rutschman’s offseason swing overhaul and intensive defensive work with catching coach Joe Singley have brought back the best version of the talismanic catcher. Albernaz is clearly taking a hands-on role with Basallo to hold him to a high standard and constantly remind the 21-year-old rookie how good he can be.

Next on the agenda: making it harder for teams to get Gunnar Henderson, Colton Cowser and Coby Mayo to chase below the strike zone. Some of those problems have persisted across multiple managers. We’ll see how the solutions land.

There are other areas where the seeking of solutions — and at least acknowledging them — feels like progress. That’s what struck me last week when I heard Albernaz speak about challenging the organization and medical staff to help keep players on the field.

Dylan Beavers became the 19th player to have spent time on the injured list Wednesday, and Albernaz said the Orioles have to “evaluate every aspect to make sure that we’re taking care of our guys and we’re doing the right thing around here.”

Every club deals with injuries, but the Orioles are at risk of a third straight season being undercut by them. They lost over half of their rotation to elbow injuries in 2024, missed Rutschman and Jordan Westburg for significant chunks in 2025, and have been without Westburg and Jackson Holliday all this year, to name a few.

It’s easier for a manager to guide a club through an injury crisis than to identify the root causes of it. I felt in that moment that he was using it as an opportunity to stay on message about constantly evolving and finding ways to get better, albeit to a different target audience than usual.

The rotation has broadly underperformed, but because of the offseason additions of Shane Baz and Chris Bassitt, it feels much sturdier than its predecessors. Like everything else, that group needs to be better.

Yet early last year, before Brandon Young debuted, Hyde didn’t seem enthused but noted the Orioles’ pitching group liked the right-hander a lot. Hearing Albernaz talk about pitching, rattling off how many inches of sweep a pitch has or going in depth on how a pitch moves and what makes it effective, makes him seem like a part of that pitching group.

This is an organization whose inability to consistently put together a playoff-caliber rotation has spanned multiple front offices through multiple decades. We know all the ways you can fail to build one. That kind of alignment is as good a way as any to change that.

It’s not lost on me that all of these issues have roots outside the manager’s office, and Elias is chiefly responsible for all of them. It’s a lot to ask of a manager to make them better, but the job is to do that. Hyde’s tenure as Orioles manager ended because, fair or not, it felt like he no longer could.

It was indeed the end of something. I can’t quite say what this is the beginning of. I just know we have to treat whatever it is as if it’s something new, because in so many ways, it is — even if the problems aren’t.