Massive overhaul of Orioles’ coaching staff continues with latest pair of hirings

The Baltimore Orioles aren’t just changing managers this winter, they’re changing the way the entire organization thinks about game planning, communication, and player development. Craig Albernaz wasn’t hired to simply inherit Brandon Hyde’s staff and nudge it forward. He was brought in to put his own fingerprints on every corner of the clubhouse. 

If you’ve been waiting to see whether the post-Hyde Orioles would lean into comfort or get uncomfortable in the name of improvement, the answer is pretty clear now. The O’s are building a staff on modern hitting concepts, information flow, and communication with players, not on old résumés and familiar names. It’s also a staff that looks a lot more like Albernaz’s career path than anything we’ve seen in Baltimore before.

Orioles’ bold coaching reset proves Craig Albernaz isn’t here to play it safe

According to multiple reports, the Orioles are set to hire Brady North as assistant hitting coach and Hank Conger as bullpen coach as they round out the 2026 staff. North, still only 34, has spent his entire professional coaching life in the Rays’ machine, most recently serving as Tampa Bay’s assistant hitting coach the last four seasons before the club offered him a different role for 2026 — and the freedom to leave if a big-league job materialized elsewhere. Now that “elsewhere” is Camden Yards, where he’ll slide in under Dustin Lind and help build an offensive identity around a young lineup that badly underperformed the last season and a half. 

North’s background should sound familiar if you’ve been paying attention to the way successful organizations operate. Tampa Bay trusted him with hitters at every level, from Rookie ball to the big leagues, and his work has spanned traditional instruction, tech-heavy hitting environments, and winter ball in Latin America. 

He also has history with Albernaz dating back to their Rays days, when Albernaz was a minor league field coordinator and catching specialist while North was cutting his teeth as a young hitting coach. That matters. This isn’t a front office randomly plugging in a name from a spreadsheet; it’s a manager hand-picking someone he already knows how to communicate with, someone who speaks the same hitting language as Lind and Ecker.

On the pitching side, Conger’s arrival as bullpen coach says a lot about what the Orioles value behind the scenes. At 37, Conger already has a bizarrely rich baseball résumé. He caught parts of seven seasons in the big leagues with the Angels, Astros and Rays before taking on a whistle-and-clipboard role, bouncing from the KBO’s Lotte Giants to a spot on the Twins’ big-league staff working with catchers and the bench.

Step back and the sheer scope of this overhaul is staggering. From last year’s staff, only French, Klimek and Plassmeyer are expected to remain, while familiar names like Robinson Chirinos, Tony Mansolino, Cody Asche, Tommy Joseph, Sherman Johnson, Anthony Sanders, Grant Anders and John Mabry have all moved on to other roles around the league or outside the organization.  

It’s a risk to turn over this much institutional knowledge in one offseason. It’s also the kind of risk you take when you accept that “good enough” isn’t good enough in a division with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Blue Jays trying to spend or develop their way right past you.

And that’s ultimately the point here for Orioles fans. This wave of hires isn’t some cosmetic shakeup to justify a new name on the manager’s door. Will it work? That depends on whether Albernaz, Lind, North, Conger and company can translate their ideas into real gains. If Baltimore is going to climb back to the top of the AL East, it was always going to start with changing the voices in the room. Now, those voices are finally in place, and the excuses are gone.