Kyle Goon: Craig Albernaz is not afraid to stir the pot. The Orioles have needed a leader like him.

SARASOTA, FLA. — If you spend five minutes with Craig Albernaz, you know where you stand in his esteem.

If you’re a player of his, he’ll harangue you while you’re at bat or on the mound. If you’re a fellow coach, he’ll throw sunflower seeds at you on the front steps of the dugout. If you’re a media member who is arriving midway through spring training (hypothetically, of course), he’ll tease you for not grinding hard enough with the rest of the club.

The Orioles manager has different explanations for the way he behaves, even around the people he likes. It’s the Massachusetts in him, he says. It’s the years paying dues as a minor league catcher and then a coach, finding ways throughout long days to entertain himself. He has a bold and sometimes bawdy sense of humor. He isn’t afraid to provoke those around him, likely to toss a cutting jab at you before offering a silent fist bump to show everything is good.

Not to toss dirt on former manager Brandon Hyde, but by comparison Albernaz — “Alby” around the ballpark — is a certified live wire.

To be honest, it’s a good thing.

It’s something the Orioles have lacked the last two seasons, when stagnation contributed to their decline. It’s hard to see Albernaz letting that happen.

“Alby definitely likes to chirp guys,” catcher Adley Rutschman said. “He’s been very up-front of what he wants and what he sees and set a clear expectation for spring training.”

Spring training with new management can be a feeling-out exercise, trying to understand how the new coaches tick and how they like to do things. Albernaz and his group leave no room for ambiguity — what you hear in the clubhouse is that the 43-year-old rookie manager could not be more direct in his expectations — or his playful barbs.

Sitting at the foot of the dugout steps, he will unspool a running commentary on the game, often with a dash of sardonic humor. At the end of a road game in West Palm Beach, when the Orioles were walked off for a loss, Albernaz poked fun at his team for giving up the final run in a low-stakes game.

“Alby definitely likes to chirp guys. He’s been very up-front of what he wants and what he sees and set a clear expectation for spring training.”

Catcher Adley Rutschman

“I knew it — called it,” he said, deadpanning. “Not my first time. I know ball.”

There is virtually no subject Albernaz will not address. In a weeklong sample of commentary with the media, he talked about disrupting players’ sleep cadence, about the scientific benefit of playing guys out of their regular positions and which Orioles he would take first in a hypothetical Wiffle ball draft (Kyle Bradish for his pitch movement and Samuel Basallo because he “can absolutely destroy Wiffle balls”).

There is not much sense of timidity, either. After years of being Stephen Vogt’s right-hand man in Cleveland, Albernaz is not wasting time figuring out how the new job works. He already has a style. It feels like he has been doing this for a while.

Said Albernaz about managing for the first time: “Nothing has been different. … It doesn’t feel like this is my first time doing this.”

Albernaz’s confidence and his intrinsic desire to constantly stir the pot will give the Orioles something different atop the clubhouse this season, and almost certainly something they’ve needed the last few years.

For whatever strengths Hyde had as a manager — and he had some, because he led a team that won 101 games — charisma was not one of them. In the later years, when the Orioles had struggles, Hyde’s sense of the problem always boiled down to one thing: The team just needed to play better.

Rarely did this diagnosis translate to definable, actionable items that led to Baltimore battling back right away. In a clubhouse of lead-by-example, strong, quiet types, very few voices, including Hyde’s, rang out to change the club’s trajectory.

Indeed, Hyde’s final stretch of managing was a May losing streak that he just couldn’t pull his squad out of. Whether or not he was the core of the team’s problems, it was hard to point to Hyde’s coaching in his final season and acknowledge he was definitely part of the solution.

For better or worse, it’s hard to see Albernaz choosing “stay the course” as an option. For a guy who is constantly cracking self-deprecating jokes about his 5-foot-8 height, he gets in guys’ faces just fine.

In a series of defensive drills this month, Albernaz dressed down Basallo — one of the organization’s brightest young players — for not blocking the ball as he saw fit. Albernaz has an eye for details, but as a former catcher he particularly isn’t afraid to call his backstops out if they’re not playing to his liking.

It’s not that Hyde never called players out or never tried to rally them. But Albernaz’s outsize personality seems tailor-made to drive sparks out of his roster. If he feels the team getting complacent or stagnant, everything in Albernaz’s being screams out to chop things up.

There are questions whether the Orioles, who are beset by key infielder injuries, have the talent to win the AL East this year. But you can see early signs that their manager is going to try like hell to extract their best efforts.

All the offseason realignment is not a guarantee the Orioles will be successful. But, with Alby in the dugout, they’re sure going to be interesting — and that feels like a good start.

This column has been updated to correct the 2023 team's win total to 101.