The last time the Orioles hired a new manager in the middle of a competitive window, Cal Ripken Jr. was still riding his Iron Man streak.

Davey Johnson resigned after the 1997 season and the Orioles opted for continuity, promoting esteemed pitching coach Ray Miller to replace him. The ballclub had reached the American League Championship Series each of the previous two seasons and owner Peter Angelos was fielding one of MLB’s highest payrolls. Pressure to capitalize on Ripken’s final years was high.

Miller, whether he was to blame or not, didn’t get them there. He lasted just two years before Angelos fired him and went looking for another. But by then it was too late. Ripken never played another full season and Baltimore didn’t make the playoffs again until 2012.

The Orioles find themselves at another pivotal point in their organization’s history. They fired skipper Brandon Hyde a quarter into the 2025 season and never recovered, selling at the trade deadline and missing the playoffs despite rostering what was perhaps the most enviable young core in the sport. The man who steadied the ship, interim manager Tony Mansolino, is under consideration for the full-time job but the Orioles are conducting an external search too.

So, what do the Orioles need in their next hire? The Baltimore Sun talked with three former managers to get their insight into how they managed heightened expectations and cultivated winning cultures in their clubhouse.

Ned Yost

Milwaukee 2003-08, Kansas City 2010-19

When the Kansas City Royals broke through as a wild-card team in 2014, they were the darling underdogs who took the baseball world by surprise on their way to pushing the dynasty-seeking San Francisco Giants to Game 7 of the World Series.

Then came the hard part.

Yost was the rare rebuild manager who saw the process all the way through, helping corral a group of homegrown, young stars into a championship ballclub. Salvador Perez, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Yordano Ventura and Danny Duffy were all under 26 years old when they first made the playoffs in 2014 and Yost believed his staff’s philosophy for teaching them how to approach the game was instrumental to the team’s winning it all a year later.

“It’s important that you be able to create that atmosphere where they walk in, they know exactly what’s expected of them and are able to go about their day,” said Yost, 71, in a phone interview. “Young players, they crave structure, they crave organization and they crave discipline. So, if you set forth a standard, they’re going to follow it.”

Yost also felt their young stars were ready for the October stage in part because he never shied away from putting them in high-leverage situations early in their careers. Though he had the advantage of doing so during a rebuild, he rarely pinch hit for his young hitters and let inexperienced pitchers work out of tough jams to prepare them for the playoffs.

“They screamed at me every time I wouldn’t pinch hit for Alcides Escobar and Alcides Escobar ended up being the NLCS Most Valuable Player in 2015,” Yost said. “It turned around and I wanted those guys as individuals and as a team to go through as many of those tough situations as I could, because if I was trying to pinch hit for a guy or defense for a guy to win 78 games, you’re taking away from a valuable experience that he could use.”

The Orioles are in win-now mode and need to prove again they can win enough games just to get to the postseason, but their next manager will also need to help them get over the hump — Baltimore still hasn’t won a playoff game since Yost’s Royals knocked them out in 2014.

“They’re going to have to find somebody that can lead a club, that can set the direction, can set the discipline, can set the goals and have the energy, day in and day out, to maintain that,” Yost said. “Not get high, not get low, just continue to stay focused on players showing up every day, working to be their best and then going out and competing at their best and taking what comes with that.”

Mike Matheny

St. Louis 2012-18, Kansas City 2020-22

Matheny knows a thing or two about taking over a job with high expectations.

The St. Louis Cardinals hired him ahead of the 2012 season to succeed Hall of Famer Tony La Russa, who had just retired after winning his third World Series title. Pennants and playoff success were the standards in St. Louis and Matheny, who had never managed at the major league level before, took over the same offseason Albert Pujols departed in free agency.

“I walked into it kind of drinking from a fire hose,” Matheny, 55, said. He kept the window open anyway. The Cardinals made the playoffs each of his first four seasons and reached the World Series in 2013; he inherited a clubhouse that, unlike that of the Orioles, was stocked with veterans, but Matheny also navigated winning in a market similar in size to Baltimore.

“Some teams seem to have the ability to go and buy more [talent] but for us it was always, ‘All right, how can we be a mid-market team and how can we find a competitive advantage?’” Matheny said. “You bring in the right people, you define a lot of those traits that kind of define a culture. And man, you just never stop beating that drum and realizing that that’s a competitive edge that draws everybody together to where the sum is greater than all of our parts. … That’s that magic ingredient everybody’s looking for.”

For Matheny, the right people included both his staff and the veterans in the clubhouse. The Cardinals had proven winners all over the roster and he relied on them to set the standard where he could not. He stressed the importance of identifying leaders among both veterans and younger players, and ensuring every position group had a few they could lean on.

The Orioles enter this offseason with plenty of money coming off the books and an ownership group that has promised to spend. Without any clear veteran leaders in the clubhouse, their next manager would benefit as much as anyone by the front office acquiring a few experienced players before next spring.

“Consistency is king, and never shying away from the obvious of the excitement in the postseason and the immediacy of it and the expectations,” Matheny said. “Those are things I think you just have to embrace.

“The teams that I’ve been a part of that have those leaders in those positions, it seems like they handle situations like bouncing into the playoffs, they handle it a whole lot better.”

Buck Showalter

N.Y. Yankees 1992-95, Arizona 1998-2000, Texas 2003-06, Baltimore 2010-18, N.Y. Mets 2022-23

Showalter needs no introduction in Baltimore. The four-time Manager of the Year shepherded the Orioles through their most successful stretch of the 21st century, making three postseason appearances and winning more regular-season games than any other team in the American League from 2012 to 2016. While a World Series title has proven elusive, there are few more experienced managers alive than Showalter and his 22 years on the top step of the dugout.

Having worked across several different eras of the game, Showalter pointed to communication with the front office as a key ingredient managers need to have for the team to be successful.

“It’s a partnership,” said Showalter, 69. “The best situations are when the front office and the manager are connected at the hip, and there’s so many things that go on behind the scenes. You’re the guy that’s out there front center every day with press, twice a day from February until the end of the season and you constantly have to worry about the weight your words carry and the way they reflect on people and, most importantly, the fan base.

“I just didn’t want to be ambushed. I said, ‘Just let me know if something’s going on, because you can’t do your job properly if you’re living and dying with every little thing that’s said and written and what have you.’ It’s not fair to the relationship you want to have with the media and to the organization if you’ve got something that’s sitting in your throat.”

Showalter also felt managing the Orioles was unique because of their market size and blue-collar nature of the fan base. The ballclub appeared to lose a significant portion of the fan base’s trust this season, suffering its biggest year-over-year drop in average attendance ever (excluding COVID-impacted seasons). Players such as Charlie Morton and Tyler O’Neill were booed by the home crowd at the heights of their respective struggles.

As the club attempts to regain the city’s faith, perhaps the biggest item on their offseason checklist after finding a manager is acquiring pitching. The Orioles need impact talent in their rotation and nearly a full restock of bullpen arms. Showalter felt that reliability was the most important trait in a pitching staff, both from results and availability standpoints, making the in-game management responsibilities of the job much easier.

“Evaluating pitching is probably the biggest challenge that teams face now,” Showalter said. “We had people that may not pitch a shutout, but they didn’t implode much. They knew what you were going to get out of every fifth day, and they would keep us in a game.”

Have a news tip? Contact Matt Weyrich at mweyrich@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/ByMattWeyrich and instagram.com/bymattweyrich.