Hyde shaped by college baseball, surprising speech

It was April 23, 1997. A dreary evening inside a hotel lobby in northeast Wichita, Kansas, when Dave Snow summoned his team.

What followed inside that landmark meeting ground on the outskirts of the Shockers’ campus has become Long Beach State baseball folklore. It’s Brandon Hyde story his former teammates retell. A watershed moment for the future Orioles skipper who helped pilot one of the greatest regular-season turnarounds in Major League Baseball, good for AL Manager of the Year finalist recognition.

Snow, a veteran baseball coach at Long Beach then in his ninth season, just watched the No. 17 Dirtbags drop back-to-back games in as many days to the 20th-ranked team in the country. They were 27-18 and fading. Snow was befuddled. He could feel the threads that stitched the group together slowly unraveling.

When a Wichita State base runner stole second earlier in the day and nobody was there to cover, the throw sailed into center field. One example of a costly miscommunication turned on-field disagreement that escalated toward a near-physical altercation in the dugout.

“We were struggling,” catcher Jon Strauss said of the 14-3 shellacking and 6-5 loss. “We had some issues. Guys weren’t on the same page. Things just weren’t going well.”

Snow was atypically short-spoken in that hotel lobby. He put the onus on his players. There was a brief, still moment. Hyde, a fifthyear catcher whose lack of playing time and reserved reputation didn’t make him the obvious choice, offered to speak.

Based on the collective memory of several Dirtbags present that spring day 26 years ago, Hyde’s speech went something like this: