Why Brandon Hyde Sees 2014 Cubs in New and Improved Orioles

Brandon Hyde sees '14 Cubs in Orioles, who school '22 Cubs originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago

Brandon Hyde has seen this before. That’s what he’ll tell anyone who asks about these new and improved Orioles that showed up at Wrigley Field Tuesday for the first time since Hyde was on the Cubs’ coaching staff.

This Orioles team that has been in perpetual rebuilding mode since before Hyde was hired to replace Buck Showalter as manager after the 2018 season.

This Orioles team that seems just like the Cubs in 2014.

Hyde certainly isn’t predicting 97 wins, or even a third-place finish, next year — especially playing in baseball’s buzzsaw division, the AL East.

But get a load of the last-place team that just improved to .500 Tuesday night by beating the Cubs 4-2 for its ninth consecutive win.

“In ’14 we got a lot more interesting the second half,” Hyde said of that Cubs team that completed a three-year selloff of veterans in July 2014, then started to turn a competitive corner heading into a breakout 2015. “[Jorge] Soler, [Arismendy] Alcantara, [Javy] Báez, [Kyle] Hendricks — so all of a sudden we got more athletic. And [Anthony] Rizzo started becoming a dude.

“We were more enjoyable to watch the second half. Fans were able to gravitate toward some young players that were starting to become possible core guys,” Hyde added. “And you thought at that time, in a couple years, these guys are going to be pretty good.”

Who knew that just eight years later, most of them would be gone — Hendricks the only one left from the 2015 team that followed with an NLCS appearance — and the Cubs would be doing this rebuild thing all over again?

Who knew even when this season started that the Orioles — and Pirates for that matter — would look like they’re ahead of of the Cubs in whatever it is team president Jed Hoyer is calling this iteration of a rebuild?

That the Orioles would be 2-0 against the Cubs (with two meetings left), 5-3 against the formidable Red Sox, 15-19 overall against the brutal AL East.

“We have more talent up here and more talent in our organization now, and they’re all getting to the upper levels now,” Hyde said of the minor-leaguers on the near horizon for a team that already graduated Baseball America's No. 1-ranked prospect to the majors (catcher Adley Rutschman) — and that also already has one of the best-performing bullpens in the majors.

“And doing what we’re doing in the AL East, there’s probably nothing harder you can do,” Hyde said. “We’re in a division where there’s four teams that have World Series expectations, three teams with endless payrolls. I’m really proud of how we’ve competed against our division this year.”

So what’s the Cubs’ excuse as a team that has the resources to have one of those endless payrolls and plays in a division that trends more often to the weak end of spectrum than the AL East end annually?

Hyde still has a lot of friends on the Cubs side of Wrigley Field these days, few closer than Cubs manager David Ross.

He’s not about to start comparing current Cubs rebuilds to Orioles’.

But it doesn’t take a typical MLB front office genius to know that the Cubs are more likely to get worse over the final two months of the season after another trade-deadline selloff — which is all but assured of involving at least one of their two All-Stars, Willson Contreras.

The Orioles, meanwhile, have improved every month of the season from a 7-14 April and 14-16 May to a 14-12 June and 9-2 July.

“I’m not looking big picture at all,” Hyde said. “The focus is still about getting our players better.”

But potential free agent shortstop Carlos Correa noted the Cubs’ record and middle-of-the-pack farm system during a conversation last week with NBC Sports Chicago and came to the conclusion that without an aggressive approach in free agency, the Cubs had a lot more rebuilding ahead of them, like the Orioles he said — before clarifying his thoughts.

“The Orioles look good,” said Correa, whose Twins survived two low-scoring games to win on walkoffs, then lost the third game of a recent series against the O’s — Baltimore’s first win of this nine-game streak.

“They’ve got a great farm system, and I think in two or three years people are going to be talking about the Orioles.”

And the Cubs?

Hyde, who joined the Cubs’ organization from the Marlins with a player-development pedigree soon after Theo Epstein and Hoyer took over in the fall of 2011, called the Cubs’ teardown over the last 19 months “disappointing” and “hard to watch.”

“When I left here, I don’t think anybody saw it coming at that time,” said Hyde, whose last Cubs team won 95 games to tie the Brewers for the best record in the National League, before losing Game 163 to the Brewers and a 13-inning, wild-card game to the Rockies.

“I thought that core group was going to be together for a while,” he said. “I knew they were all great players, so they probably couldn’t keep all of them.”

But maybe a couple of them? Maybe reset? Maybe use some of those enormous, Boston-like resources to bridge gaps and stay competitive instead of tearing it all down for the second time in a decade?

“I don’t know what the answer is,” Hyde said. “I’m still very close to a lot of those guys [who were traded]. … It was disappointing. And hard to watch. I saw all the Twitter videos of them leaving last year. That was hard to watch.”

Especially with all the tears involved.

“Because that group did something so incredibly special, and together, and they were so close and so young that you though that it was going to continue,” Hyde said.

Nobody seems to know how long the Cubs rebuild might take before they’re back in the playoffs, even compared to the Orioles. Least of all, perhaps, Hyde.

If nothing else, Hyde seems to have faith in old friends.

“I think Jed is extremely, extremely smart,” Hyde said. “And he knows how to build a winning team. So if I were Cubs fans, I would have all the faith in Jed to turn this around quickly.”

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