Only the Orioles could make an act as bold as firing their manager feel like mere convention.

If dismissing Brandon Hyde just two weeks after publicly supporting him feels uncharacteristically spicy for general manager Mike Elias, you are only measuring it by his own standard. By every meaningful metric, the Orioles are drastically underachieving, hitting poorly and pitching inconsistently while losing 10 of their last 12.

Somebody deserved to lose his job for that, and Hyde was the most glaring candidate. Elias disappointed fans by not making more waves in free agency — but, hey, nothing is splashier than firing your manager midseason.

There would never have been a more obvious moment to can Hyde than after the game when the Orioles scraped just three runs out of 14 hits and four walks in a loss to the Washington Nationals. There would never be a better news dump to fire him than the day of the Preakness, when the region’s focus is fixated on a horse race.

But, now that Elias has pulled the lever on Hyde, there’s no buffer to shield him from the blame for this season’s disaster. After promising “liftoff” in 2022, the Orioles strung together back-to-back winning seasons, but this year the team is plummeting back to the bottom of the standings.

The angry gaze of disgruntled Baltimore fans is now on the front office, and it’s unclear how many more bold moves Elias has left before his own seat heats up in a hurry.

If the firing feels like deflecting blame, it isn’t. Hyde deserved his share of this reckoning. A team’s manager is expected to have the strongest grasp on its problems, but too often Hyde seemed to be just as flummoxed as the fans.

After the 4-3 loss to the Nationals in which the team gave up the winning run on a dramatic error by Felix Bautista, Hyde said, “I’m kind of in disbelief, honestly,” which doesn’t add up to accountability or an explanation. He also weakly offered some positives from the performance — the exact thing nobody wants to hear when you give away a game you had every chance to win.

But Hyde isn’t to blame for Charlie Morton and Kyle Gibson being busts in the starting rotation. It’s hard to lay Adley Rutschman’s regression at his feet or call him out for Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle going through slumps. His commitment to matching his lineups to the handedness of opposing pitching (with few exceptions) rankled fans, but we’ll see how much his approach was shaped by the advice of the front office when interim manager Tony Mansolino starts submitting lineup cards.

Not every one of the Orioles’ problems can be traced to Elias, but several can be.

A timid approach to free-agent pitchers after a Corbin Burnes deal fell through has the Orioles grasping for strong starts. Everyone can see the ace-size hole left in the rotation.

The hitters he signed in hopes of performing better against left-handed starters have largely underperformed. Injuries haven’t helped here, but key signing Tyler O’Neill has just a .247 OPS vs. lefties.

Even his prized draft picks — who in 2023 were the toast of baseball — have somewhat perplexingly come up short. Rutschman is a confusing poster boy for this, but also Heston Kjerstad has struggled and Coby Mayo can’t stick in the majors yet. Meanwhile, Miami’s Kyle Stowers is batting nearly .300 while Trevor Rogers (the return for Stowers in that 2024 trade) is getting blasted by Triple-A hitters.

Coming out of the rebuild, Elias (the 2023 MLB executive of the year) had a golden touch, with a 101-win ballclub and the No. 1 farm system in baseball. Two years later, both of those stars have fallen. The Orioles no longer have the trade leverage they enjoyed then, and moving even obvious sell-off candidates (Mullins, Mountcastle) at this deadline should be a whole lot harder.

Elias has built his brand largely on marginal, risk-averse moves in service of keeping the Orioles’ competitive window open as long as possible — but the downside of that approach was always that windows sometimes slam shut for reasons no executive can control.

There are still promising pieces to this team. That’s why the expectations were so far ahead of the results. But Elias’ options have winnowed, and by firing a longtime close partner in Hyde, he’s running out of levers to pull. It can’t be lost that this ownership group, for as much admiration as it has for him, did not hire him to this role.

Elias’ next hire at manager had better be the right one, because it could be one of his last big decisions.

He should start acting like there’s no tomorrow, because Hyde’s firing is a reminder that no one’s job is safe — and the most precarious perch of all might be for the man at the top.