The night before the biggest game of his life, Bruce Zimmermann walked on to a quiet, empty, mostly dark Camden Yards field to imagine how things might go the next day—and take in the setting.

In a scene from a baseball fairytale, a little after 9 p.m. on Sunday, with no one else around, the 27-year-old that grew up a 20-minute drive away near Ellicott City stepped on the pitcher’s mound at Oriole Park and gazed at the sights.

There was the Opening Day logo spray-painted in white in the grass behind home plate. The new deeper, and higher left field wall, reconstructed in the offseason, to help pitchers just like him. And, of course, his eyes drifted to the iconic brick warehouse in right field, gently lit in the black sky.

“It was storybook, in a way,” Zimmermann said.

So was what happened the next day.

In the 30th Opening Day in Camden Yards on Monday afternoon—and the first home opener in two years where most of the stadium’s seats were filled—Zimmermann’s performance compelled thousands of fans to chant his first name, as if he were the New Jersey-born lead singer of the E Street Band.

Bruuuce!

On a warm spring afternoon, the 6-foot-1, 220-pound leftie buttoned-up his No. 50 Orioles jersey and threw four scoreless innings. He tossed 66 pitches in all, and allowed only three hits to power the Orioles to their first win of the year, a 2-0 victory over the visiting Milwaukee Brewers. (If you’re a fan of symmetry, it was the exact same score the Orioles won their first-ever game at Camden Yards, 30 years ago.)

For a guy only beginning his second full big-league season, who grew up in the Baltimore suburbs, went to high school at Loyola-Blakefield, and then had a mostly unremarkable stint pitching at Towson University, it was as magical a day as they come.

“This one will always be up there for sure,” Zimmermann said afterward, standing near his locker. “I have to put it right there with my debut, maybe a little bit more, with everything and the environment. The first time seeing Oriole Park like that, as a player, was incredibly special.”

It was for those of us in the crowd, too. For one thing, the noise was back, along with the sense of a freewheeling, communal experience that, even with limited crowds last year, has been largely missing from Camden Yards since 2019 because of the pandemic.

On Monday, when Orioles outfielder Cedric Mullins smacked a go-ahead, two-run single in the second inning, scoring lightning-fast shortstop Jorge Mateo all the way from second base, the cathartic sound of celebration was reminiscent of a big playoff moment.

“Oh yeah,” Mullins said. “That was awesome. It was an exciting moment. And we’re going to have a lot more.”

Frankly, Opening Day 2022 felt almost normal, as if we had we not lived through the past two years.

I was one of the rare few to attend the last two home openers. In 2020, I sat with a few dozen onlookers in the press box for an eerie July game against the Yankees played in front of no fans and in near silence with hand sanitizer use strongly encouraged.

Last year, a limited capacity of roughly 10,000 fans took in the O’s more traditional early April opener against the Boston Red Sox. We wrote then that it was a step toward life as we used to know it.

This year’s Opening Day marked another, and perhaps the biggest—in a baseball context. It was a crisply played game in which health protocols and COVID-19 worries finally seemed secondary to what happened on the field.

Before Zimmermann’s first pitch, fans strolled down Eutaw Street in orange-and-black gear, without masks, some in pursuit of a fresh Boog’s Barbecue sandwich, others in search of a table at Dempsey’s Brew Pub on the first level of the warehouse.

Yet a few other architecturally-inclined minds—and some kids in search of baseballs from the Brewers warming up on the field—headed straight to something new: the remade left-field stands.

In the offseason, the O’s removed roughly 1,000 seats from the short porch in left, making the field larger and home run wall a little higher, a design intended to reduce the number of home runs that fly out of the park, some that would be routine flyouts in other pro stadiums.

If it looks like someone—or specifically, construction workers—carved a slice out of what used to be there, that’s exactly what happened. There’s also now an awkward sharp corner in deep left field that we hope no one runs into full speed.

One game into the season: So far, so good.

Eventually, everyone (the crowd was announced as a sellout of 44,461 but there were obvious empties to the contrary) found their seats, and the lower bowl filled beneath a clear blue sky and gentle sun, as the orange carpet was rolled out in center field to cap off orchestrated pregame ceremonies.

As part of the festivities, Mullins received a giant Silver Slugger trophy—marking his peers voting him the best hitter in all of baseball at his position in 2021, following a breakout season in which he became the first Oriole ever to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in a season.

Fan favorite, cancer-beater and longest-tenured O Trey Mancini, who started at designated hitter, received the loudest ovation. First baseman Ryan Mountcastle, who set a team record for home runs by a rookie last year, beating a mark previously held by Cal Ripken Jr., enjoyed a loud welcome back too.

After the game, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde, who, like the rest of us, didn’t sign up for the circumstances of the past two years, said, “It was fun to hear Orioles fans cheering, and a lot of them. Our guys fed off the energy.”

Also during pregame, on the scoreboard in center field, Baltimore-based poet and author Kondwani Fidel delivered a video tribute to Camden Yards’ 30-year anniversary that gave us chills.

The Morgan State University choir, which performed the national anthem at Oriole Park on April 6, 1992, did the same this year (more symmetry!), while a giant flag from Fort McHenry was draped behind the green facade.

And, for the ceremonial first pitch, Kortez Baker, the son of slain Baltimore City police officer Keona Holley, as well as relatives of the three city firefighters who died in action in January, and the one who survived, John McMaster, took positions near the mound.

Then there was Zimmermann, who became the first Maryland-born pitcher to start a home opener for the Orioles since 1990, and first to ever do it at Camden Yards. And it happened nearly four years after he first joined the Orioles organization as a minor-leaguer via a trade that sent pitchers Kevin Gausman and Darren O’Day to the Atlanta Braves.

Before the game, Hyde said he hoped Zimmermann could handle the obvious butterflies in anticipation of the moment. He started 13 games last year after being called up late in 2020, but had never started Opening Day in his hometown ballpark. (Thus the night-before walkthrough, perhaps.)

After the game, Hyde said, “Zim pitched extremely well,” and highlighted his effective mix of fastballs, changeups and curveballs.

So how was Bruuuce’s anxiety level? “Pretty manageable,” Zimmermann told us. “It was high, but I knew it was going to be high. It was another start, with a lot of added adrenaline. I was more concerned about just getting through a clean first inning and setting up the rest of my outing.”

After a 1-2-3 first inning, we heard his first name being chanted a little bit in appreciation from O’s die-hards. And, after the second inning, when he struck out a batter with an off-speed pitch and a runner on second, it felt like we were at Springsteen concert. Same at the end of the third, when he got out of a bases-loaded jam following a brief mound visit from pitching coach Chris Holt.

“Walking off and hearing the Bruuuce chant and everything,” Zimmermann said, “that really hit and fired me up a little bit more.”

So did the knowledge that a large crew of longtime supporters, including his parents, aunts and uncles, and former college coaches were in attendance behind home plate.

Admittedly, though, Zimmermann tried not to look at them. He feared even a momentary distraction in the loud, jumpy environment could veer him from the vision of success he’d had on the mound in the quiet moments at Camden Yards the night before.

“Internally, there was a lot going on,” he said. “Usually, I do try to peek up, but [with] the magnitude of the day today, it was just kind of, ‘Stay focused as long as possible.’”

That was about four innings. On the surface, a performance of that length might not seem like something worth much glory, but it was the most that was expected of him. Given an abbreviated spring training stemming from labor negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and players that delayed the start of preseason and Opening Day, Zimmermann’s pitch count on Monday was predetermined to be 70.

He finished four just shy of his maximum, and he looked sharp, striking out four and allowing two walks. Two-thirds of his pitches were strikes, a very good sign of things to come.

“It’s a long season ahead,” Zimmermann said, “but getting this win and everything about today was the perfect way to set off a hopefully long, healthy, successful season.”

Orioles public address announcer Ryan Wagner kept saying what he always has: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome…” We couldn’t blame him, or anyone else, for wanting Opening Day to be the same joyful scene it has always has been for so many different people.

But on Wednesday night at Camden Yards, Wagner’s words fell on no ears.

As Orioles manager Brandon Hyde exited the dugout along the first-base line and players followed behind him around 7:22 p.m., the fans that Wagner was addressing weren’t there. Not in the green seats. Not on Eutaw Street grabbing a pre-game Boog’s BBQ sandwich. Not in a downtown parking garage trying to rush to see the first pitch. Not anywhere, except maybe listening on the radio or watching at home.

Officially, it was the Orioles 2020 home opener against the visiting New York Yankees, but the only thing about this one that resembled any of the past openers was the players on both teams wearing fancy pro uniforms—and maybe that those damn Yankees hit a few home runs early and often.

When the Orioles’ Asher Wojciechowski threw the game’s first pitch, it was hard to know anything significant happened. And when, on the second pitch, the Yankees’ second baseman DJ LeMahieu connected for a home run over the right field scoreboard, from the press box, all that was heard were a few echoes of cheers from the visitor’s dugout.

Later, when a lazy foul ball went into the seats, all I heard was the crack of the baseball against the concrete walkway as it landed. We also heard fake crowd noise after the Orioles scored a run, and saw Major League Baseball staff cleaning baseballs. At one point, I realized, shouldn’t the Oriole Bird be here somewhere?

But only the players from the two teams, the umpires, roughly two dozen reporters like me, a handful of photographers and MASN camera operators, and team staff and security guards were actually there. Maybe a few hundred people in all, each having their temperature taken before entering the stadium and wearing masks if they weren’t on the field playing before an empty stadium on a warm summer night.

“It’s just different,” Wojciechowski said of the environment after the Orioles lost 9-3, via a Zoom video call with reporters. “It’s just weird.”

From what we’ve seen from televised games so far, it might have felt less strange watching at home, with announcers talking over the action, ambient crowd noise, and some teams even placing cardboard cutouts of season-ticket holders behind home plate, a very cool idea.

But there’s a hollowness to being there in person. There’s no such thing as home field advantage. You can hear ambulances driving outside. It’s like a vampire sucked the energy from the place. A lot of players have always thanked the fans for being there, and now you can really see why. “There’s no energy,” Hyde said. “You really have to create the energy in your dugout, at a distance.”

Unfortunately, as we know, the fanless scene had happened here before (and will again this year so long as the Orioles play home games this season). The last time was during the height of the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of police five years ago, a moment that was revisited during pregame ceremonies, along with a special tribute to team and fan favorite Mo Gaba, who passed away at age 14 after a lifelong battle with cancer on Tuesday.

Today, the backdrop is different. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown normal life upside down in many ways. Despite that, Major League Baseball and the other major professional sports league are attempting to put on seasons, for entertainment if nothing else. And baseball’s effort—with teams traveling to different cities like everything is normal—has already come with challenges officials hoped wouldn’t arrive this soon.

Originally, the Orioles were supposed to open their abbreviated home season against the Miami Marlins on Wednesday night (after playing them twice in Miami following their season-opening series in Boston), but earlier this week, more than a dozen Marlins players and staff tested positive for COVID-19 after being in Philadelphia, forcing a last-minute scheduling change that put the Yankees in Baltimore for two games.

The Orioles, after flying from Boston to Miami, spent an entire day in the Four Seasons hotel (Hyde recommends the room-service cheeseburger there) while awaiting word on if and when they would play next. They flew back to Baltimore on Monday night and got word Tuesday about playing the Yankees instead. “It’s 2020,” Hyde said. “We’re constantly adjusting.”

Take the story of often-beleaguered slugger Chris Davis, for instance. He spoke to the media on Tuesday about how, despite all the safety protocols—like staying apart in the clubhouse—and just arriving back home after the 24-hour roundtrip to Miami, attempting a season was still worth all the trouble.

“Honestly, the baseball aspect is really what gives you a release,” Davis said. “To be around the guys, to play the game you love, to be out on a baseball field, it takes you a little bit away from everything that’s going on around you—even when you have handwashing stations at the end of dugout and the trainers are spraying hand sanitizer everywhere. There’s enough of a break in between the white lines to give you peace of mind, and allows you to sleep a little better at night, at least there is for me.”

Then the next afternoon, Hyde announced that Davis would be “unavailable” for the home opener, and he hasn’t been around the team the last two days. As per the Orioles policy, you can make your own assumptions on why that is, but a COVID-19 positive test is reasonable. Davis worked out with the team Tuesday night and was penciled in the lineup as designated hitter until sometime Wednesday.

“It’s definitely an unusual year, in every way,” Hyde said. “There’s a lot of things that are really important outside of baseball right now. We’re happy to be playing, but we do know what’s going on outside of our bubble.”

I looked at a picture I took of Opening Day at Camden Yards last year. Fans sat in just about every green seat on a sunny day. The orange carpet lay through centerfield. You could imagine the pomp and circumstance. It felt like I was looking into a time capsule.

It will all come back. We don’t know when, but it will eventually. Until then, though, we’re left with strange scenes that force us to make sense of what we’re seeing.

We think of a few words Hyde uttered the other night from his office at Camden Yards. Someone asked about reports suggesting that Major League Baseball would start playing shorter seven-inning doubleheaders instead of the usual nine-inning game once a day, given the scheduling re-shuffling that was already happening with a COVID-19 outbreak among one team, less than a week into the season.

“This year…” Hyde said, his voice trailing off before he sighed.

And that’s really all that was needed to be said.

Mike Elias

General Manager

Via: Houston Astros Good to know: Elias grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, going to Orioles games as a young boy. Buzzword: Scouting Quote giving us hope: “In its history and its DNA, this organization was once considered the smartest, most forward- thinking, most progres- sive team in baseball. The fact that that was the case here before means it’s possible for that to be the case here again.”

Brandon Hyde

Manager

Via: Chicago Cubs Good to know: Hyde was a base coach for the 2016 World Series champion Cubs. You can Google plenty of photos of him celebrating during Game 7. Buzzword: Collaboration Quote giving us hope: “Brooks Robinson’s sitting here. I’m in my new office, and there’s pictures of Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken Sr. To be around history and be involved in a city like Baltimore is a dream come true.”

Sig Mejdal

Assistant General Manager

Via: Houston Astros Good to know: A former NASA engineer who studied the sleep patterns of astronauts, Mejdal also worked as the chief quantitative analyst for a fantasy baseball team. Buzzword: Analytics Quote giving us hope: “What you see as an exceptional slider, or a wonderful fastball, can be quantified. Instead of say- ing, ‘He just has good stuff,’ we’re able to describe [it] to three decimal points.”

Koby Perez

Director of International Scouting

Via: Cleveland Indians Good to know: Perez spent more than a decade scouring the Caribbean for players. (The Orioles did not sign any of last year’s top 30 international prospects.) Buzzword: Talent Quote giving us hope: “Mike [Elias] has made me aware that he’s there for us in this department to show face in the Dominican Republic and make trips down there as necessary.”

John Vidalin

COO

Via: Miami Heat Good to know: He’s got kindness in spades. Not only was he born and raised in Alberta, Canada, but he previously served on the boards of the Boys & Girls Club and YMCA. Buzzword: Fan-first Quote giving us hope: “The Orioles annually rank at the very top of our industry in delivering customer experi- ence and family memories to their fans. I am eager to . . . continue and expand upon that fan-first vision.”

Tim Cossins

Catching Instructor

Via: Chicago Cubs Good to know: Cossins’ 19-year- old son, Aiden, served as a volunteer firefighter during the October 2017 Northern California wild- fires. Buzzword: Mentor Quote giving us hope: “I’ve seen a lot of video,” Cossins told reporters at FanFest. “This group of catchers, I’ve been doing it long enough to know that they’re going to work. I dig what I’m seeing a lot.”

Branden Kline

Pitcher

Via: Bowie Baysox Good to know: Though Kline spent the last three seasons deal- ing with an elbow injury, his velocity on the mound is right back where it started. Buzzword: Changeup Quote giving us hope: “So, it took about halfway through the season last year for me to get that feeling back, and then from there, it was like, ‘OK, now it’s time to go have some fun. Let’s compete, and let’s improve.’”

DJ Stewart

Outfielder

Via: Bowie Baysox Good to know: Stewart was drafted out of high school by the Yankees but chose to play college baseball at Florida State University. We like him already! Buzzwords: Power Quote giving us hope: “We’re going out there to win. You never want to lose, so we’re not going to have that in our head. We want to win, every single game.”

Cedric Mullins

Outfielder

Via: Baltimore Orioles Good to know: While Mullins is technically not new new, this is his first full season with the O’s, and we are excited to see what he’ll do consider- ing he started out with a record-breaking debut. Buzzword: Speed Quote giving us hope: “I’m very optimistic. We’re going to be a very scrappy team, a team that’s able to produce runs and put some wins on the board.”

Sara Perlman

Broadcaster

Via: MASN Good to know: Perlman has covered base- ball, soccer, football, and even cage fighting. This year, she’ll take on a new role as a sideline reporter. Buzzword: Accessible Quote giving us hope: “You’re talking about starting from the ground up, and that started with Mike Elias from the Astros, an analytics-heavy organization. This is a full tear down and rebuild, which is how you’ve got to do it.”

For all the many mentions and questions about analytics, player development, and the Orioles’ new data-driven era on Saturday afternoon at the Baltimore Convention Center, there was one moment that stuck out. And it was when recently hired Orioles assistant general manager Sig Mejdal, a former NASA engineer turned baseball front-office pioneer, took to the stage in front of hundreds of fans as part of a question-and-answer session titled, “Using Analytics Across Baseball Ops.”

For 35 minutes at the team’s annual preseason FanFest, the 53-year-old Mejdal (pronounced my-dell) sat on a brown wooden stool, the same one from which his boss and longtime co-worker, the O’s GM Mike Elias had earlier described the broad, long-term vision for the organization’s rebuild. Now Mejdal was in the spotlight, wearing a gray suit with a bright orange tie and black shoes, and he articulated details of what the presence of this new Ivy League and computer science-trained leadership regime means here and now—how blending numbers-based facts and analysis with the human nature of America’s pastime can work.

And Mejdal described the approach as only a true believer in the scientific method and the power of technology could do. He’s a guy who worked as a blackjack dealer in college, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical and mechanical engineering, and earned two master’s degrees—one in mathematical modeling and another in human-factors engineering (whatever that is). As he spoke, the day felt more like a Big Data business conference than a celebration and promotion of spring training kicking off in a few weeks.

“A lot of things that were just below the human’s ability to sense have now been revealed,” Mejdal said, as he detailed how it’s possible to use high-resolution video and radar to record things like velocity, location, and spin rate of a baseball thrown by a pitcher. “What you see as an exceptional slider, or a wonderful fastball, can be quantified. Instead of saying, ‘He just has good stuff,’ we’re able to describe the stuff to three decimal points and begin to see the specific idiosyncratic behaviors of the different hitters, and how they succeed or struggle against pitches that aren’t just called ‘a slider,’ but instead a pitch of 83 miles per hour with 18 inches of horizontal movement, and 1.5 inches of depth.”

Got all that? Mejdal said it without a pause. He’s been doing this sort of quantitative analysis, and finding data-driven ways to give teams an edge, almost as long as anybody in professional baseball, save for the early 2000s staff of the Oakland Athletics, who were featured in the book and movie Moneyball. That tale inspired Mejdal to consider his current career path and ultimately quit his job engineering for astronauts.

As was written in the 2005 book Fantasyland by Sam Walker, in which Mejdal was featured, he once worked in a windowless office on an U.S. Air Force base in California called the Blue Cube, a communications nerve center from which all satellite transmissions are routed and a security clearance is needed for entry.

That was 15 years ago, long before the numbers guys became fashionable hires in baseball, if not no-brainers to small-market owners like John and Louis Angelos looking to build sustainable winners. At the time, Mejdal, who grew up in San Jose the son of a career Army officer, and his wife, a nurse from Colombia, worked a hotel lobby in New Orleans during MLB’s winter meetings. He handed out packets of information to general managers about why teams should hire him. On the laptop in his backpack, he carried with him data of every player who wore a uniform since the Korean War, and promised he could provide previously unrealized truths with his analysis and ideas. He didn’t mention he hadn’t played baseball since Little League.

Mejdal landed with the St. Louis Cardinals 18 months later, a hire that not only gave him a dream job but also his first professional baseball lesson: “Even if it doesn’t seem broke, you fix it.”

“The owner of the Cardinals, at a time when they were winning 100 games, at a time when they weren’t persons like myself in baseball, brought in Jeff Luhnow [as general manager],” an MBA from Northwestern who hadn’t played baseball since high school. He hired Mejdal, and Elias, a former Yale pitcher, as a 24-year-old scout. Along with implementing an international scouting operation (just like the O’s are currently trying to do), they were key in developing several players on a team that won 2011 World Series.

“From day one of our incoming draft classes, they were taught and shown how we’re going to fix them,” Mejdal said. “Human factors are involved, there’s a sensitivity to it, but the underlying goal is to fix everything we can, because we have a good idea the opposition is trying to do that too.”

In seven years in St. Louis, Mejdal was credited with developing an analytics model that helped the team draft more future major leaguers than any other organization during that span. In 2012, he followed Luhnow to the Houston Astros, where Mejdal became the inventively named Director of Decision Sciences. There, as the right-hand man to Elias, Mejdal was instrumental in the development on the Astros farm system and turnaround from three straight seasons of at least 106 losses to a World Series championship in 2017.

Next stop on the success train? Hopefully Baltimore, where Elias took over leadership of O’s personnel two months ago, and brought the guts, ideas, and ethos of those previous stat-driven revolutions with him.

“Over the years, as we add some things to our draft and scouting process, as we bring in a lot of the analytics that Sig and I have really developed together for the draft, across two different organizations, the depth in our system will benefit greatly,” Elias said Saturday. “You’ll see the product of that the next couple years.”

That’s right, this may take a while. Elias and new manager Brandon Hyde are preaching patience. But in the immediate was Saturday’s stage scene, where Mejdal, sitting next to recently hired director of international scouting Koby Perez, fielded questions from the most dedicated fans on a variety of topics. And they gave insightful, honest answers and lessons that could be applied to a business or classroom as much as they will be to the Orioles clubhouse.

A few current and past players, like pitcher Paul Fry and Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, were even listening on Mejdal. He spoke about everything from how to start learning about analytics (go to baseball-reference.com—that’s what we use, too) to advice for college students interested in the field (you can’t go wrong with a computer science education), to the nuances of gathering, analyzing, and sharing usable statistical information to players and coaches.

On how the O’s analytics department is developing, Mejdal said:
“When we came here seven weeks ago, the analytics department consisted of zero analysts. I don’t know what the ideal number is but I’m pretty confident it’s not zero.”

On whose responsibility it is that players or coaches use the information provided to them:
“It’s the analyst’s responsibility to ensure that whoever the customer is—whether it’s the coach, the scouting director, the GM, the director of international, or a player—that they understand what the insight is and that you’ve done all you can to present it and to them. You’re asking them to change and that doesn’t just come with a printout from the computer saying, ‘Here, go change.’”

On what information analysts can provide to a player:
“We can provide a general behavior. ‘This is generally where you struggle. This is generally where the pitcher is going to throw at this point.’ It’s a model. It falls short of what’s going to happen in real life. But it’s still going to be useful.”

On how to keep the Orioles ahead of the analytics curve:
“We’re going to fill our department with the most skilled and innovative analysts and developers we can find, and we’re going to create a culture where a big chunk of their time is directed at, ‘What is the next big thing?’ Is it going to be computer vision, some artificial intelligence, something less sexy than that? We’re going to do our best to position ourselves to be better than any other club out there.”

On if the Orioles will have a better season than last year’s franchise-worst 47-115 record:
“I’m not going to make that prediction sitting up here in front of all of you, but what I can tell you is there in an amazing amount of young talent not just at the major league level, but throughout the system, and the future of the Orioles is right in front of you.”

It’s a new era, indeed. Could you imagine former manager Buck Showalter or GM Dan Duquette discussing artificial intelligence? At FanFest over the last several years, all they did was talk about playoffs. But for all the seemingly programmatic talk about customers, models, and data sets from the new leadership, there’s also a very interesting, human part of Mejdal’s story that blends the traditional and new-age ways of approaching team-building.

Two summers ago, Mejdal spent the season as an assistant coach for one of the Astros’ minor league teams, the Tri-City ValleyCats of the New York-Penn League, based in Troy, New York. The idea was to interact with minor league players in the flesh, to see what they really needed, and how best to turn office concepts into baseball field realities. It was similar what Mejdal did in his previous life in engineering.

“We could go to lunch and come up with wonderful ideas about how to help the minor leagues, but we’re ignorant to a large degree of really what it’s like,” he said. “There’s no better way to see what it’s like than be in a bus and bad hotels for 82 days.”

And so he did, road-tripping to games against teams like the Vermont Lake Monsters, Lowell Spinners, and Aberdeen IronBirds. He learned things about the game he hadn’t realized before, like how little one-on-one time players and coaches experience during the season. Then last year he roved among other minor league teams, doing the same. The New York Times chronicled the story, and accompanying photos showed Mejdal—wearing jersey No. 21, in honor of his college blackjack dealer career—in the dugout and on the field, where he coached first base.

“It was bizarre, but it was wonderful,” Mejdal said, “and a great learning experience.”

That’s a statement that carries extra weight when spoken by a former rocket scientist. If Mejdal can still learn, so can we.

The 45-year-old father of three who was introduced as the new manager of the Orioles on Monday afternoon didn’t deliver very many snappy quotes or tell long, winding perspective-laden stories like his predecessor did from the same table in Camden Yards’ auxiliary clubhouse the last eight years.

But Brandon Hyde isn’t going to be Buck Showalter, or anyone else for that matter. “I’m going to be me,” he said during a 35-minute debut press conference. Which begs the question, upon his arrival in Baltimore: Who exactly is he?

For starters, no offense, Hyde is a dirtbag. More specifically a Long Beach State Dirtbag, a 1997 alum of the California college and baseball program. From there, the mascots and names he wore on his uniform didn’t get much more glamorous. After a five-year minor league playing career as a catcher, Hyde began his coaching career by managing the Greensboro Grasshoppers, Carolina Mudcats and Jupiter Hammerheads of the Florida Marlins organization from 2005 to 2008.

At 10 years older than his new boss, the O’s new data-driven general manager Mike Elias, Hyde is already a baseball lifer, a journeyman type that toiled in the minors—“I was an average to below average minor league player who had to work for everything that he got,” he said. Then as a coach, before breaking into the big leagues as a bench coach, essentially a team’s No. 2 in command, in 2010 and holding that job for two different teams, most recently for the Chicago Cubs alongside Joe Maddon, one of the most respected managers in the game.

“He’s somebody who’s viewed as an up-and-coming star in our business,” Elias said of Hyde. “His was the very first name I heard. Every phone call I made, his name always came up.”

Shortly after Elias handed Hyde a fresh Orioles hat and a white No. 18 jersey to slip over his white collared shirt and orange tie to make things official, he became emotional as he sat down to read out loud from a sheet of prepared notes. “This is overwhelming,” he said, before hitting all the right points.

He talked about his strengths developing players and relationship building, skills that will be much needed as the O’s embark on a comprehensive overhaul from the front office to the lowest rungs of the minor leagues after a team-worst 115-loss season.

Hyde recognized Orioles Hall of Fame third baseman and current team ambassador Brooks Robinson sitting in the front row of the audience, and showed reverence for the team’s history and tradition. “Brooks Robinson’s sitting here,” Hyde said. “I’m in my new office, and there’s pictures of Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken, Sr. To be around history, and be involved in a city like Baltimore, is a dream come true. . . . I understand the significance of this position.”

And he and Elias, who’ve just gotten to know each other through the interview process, each talked about how they planned to work together. Elias and his right-hand man, former NASA engineer Sig Mejdal, and staff will supply “advanced information,” in the form of statistics, analytics, and scouting reports to Hyde, who, along with his yet-to-be-named assistant coaching staff (the work begins on that this week), will make sense of it and relay it to players.

“The buzzword,” Hyde said, “is collaboration. Open thinking and free conversation, creative ideas. That’s our goal here.”

The new manager, the 20th in Orioles history, also teared up when he thanked his parents, sister, wife, two daughters, and son Colton, who was somewhat of a fixture in the Cubs clubhouse when they broke their franchise’s 108-year long championship drought in 2016 and won the World Series.

Before each game at Wrigley Field, a then eight-year-old Colton and his dad played catch in the outfield. The next summer the he could be seen in the outfield making diving catches during batting practice. And now you can watch him here on YouTube. Cubs players considered Hyde’s son a lucky charm.

Chances are you might see the kid doing the same in one of the outfield corners at Camden Yards, if he practices what his father preaches. “The bottom line is to be true to yourself every single day,” his dad said. And so, we’ll see what that looks like in action soon enough.