The Angels fired three coaches for not using tools the front office already bought and installed, which makes this less a coaching change than an admission that nobody checked whether the equipment was plugged in. Pitching coach Mike Maddux, assistant Darryl Scott, and bullpen coach Dom Chiti were let go on August 11, and interim general manager John Mozeliak didn’t reach for the usual vague language about “philosophical fit.” He said the ask was to “use all the different tools that you see a lot of pitchers use today.” That’s not a strategy shift; that’s a staff fired for not opening software the team already paid for.
Mozeliak has been running the Angels for a month, since the club fired Perry Minasian after a decade-plus without a playoff appearance and a 392-500 record that made “rebuild” sound generous by comparison. He inherited a pitching staff with the seventh-worst ERA in baseball at 4.51 and a league-leading 508 walks, the kind of stat line that usually gets discussed in scouting meetings using the word “talent.” Mozeliak didn’t describe it that way. He described it as an access problem: tools that existed, sitting unopened.
There’s a version of this where the R&D department, in Mozeliak’s own word, lives upstairs, cranking out models and pitch-shape breakdowns, and the offense apparently rides that elevator every day. He said as much himself: “I know our research and development team upstairs, they’re providing a lot of useful things that I think we can be taking advantage of.” He added that the Angels’ technology is on par with the rest of the league and that he’s confident the hitting side uses it well. The pitching staff, in his telling, just never made the trip upstairs.
That’s an odd thing for a front office to sound proud of solving. If the tools were sitting there the whole time, the failure wasn’t three coaches discovering a shortcut too late; it was ownership building an R&D operation, stocking it with useful things, and never once walking down to check whether the pitching staff climbed the stairs to get any of it. Mozeliak framed the firings as accountability. It reads more like a company finding an invoice it approved years ago and being shocked, shocked, that nobody used what it bought.
He wasn’t cagey about how long this had been building, either. “I think there was becoming some level of frustration with the inconsistency of that, and so ultimately that’s when we started thinking about, ‘Do we need to make a change?’” is not the sentence of someone who discovered a problem in week three. It’s the sentence of a front office that watched the inconsistency accumulate for years and waited for a new interim GM to be the one who finally pulled the plug.
First-year manager Kurt Suzuki signed off on it, in the measured way managers do when they’ve decided not to fight a decision that’s already made: “I appreciated everything that they did. They worked hard. They prepared. At the end of the day, Mo and I felt like the path moving forward in these last 43 games … we felt like this was the best way.” Forty-three games remain on a season that’s already lost. The Angels are 45-74, the worst record in the sport, with a staff that walked more hitters than anyone else in it. Double-A pitching coach Tim Leveque is now the interim pitching coach, and Michael Wuertz takes the bullpen — two men handed the same unopened software, on a shorter clock.
News of the firings landed the way most Angels news does these days: fast, and secondhand.
https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/2087246657041711427
Maddux is 64 and had gone 24 consecutive years as an MLB pitching coach before the firing, a tenure that has outlasted ownership groups, general managers, and apparently R&D budgets. None of that experience is what got him fired. What got him fired, by the team’s own account, is that the technology existed and its use was inconsistent — a framing that keeps the blame hovering just above the three men who actually lost their jobs and never quite lands on whoever decided a 64-year-old with two and a half decades in dugouts needed the login information explained to him.
This is Mozeliak’s second staff move since taking over, after he’s already signaled he’s open to trading the roster out from under Kurt Suzuki, and the pattern is starting to look less like a rebuild and more like an audit. The Angels didn’t develop a coaching problem this month. They had one for years, and the front office is only now getting around to reading the usage reports it apparently never checked before.
