Angels Fire 3 Coaches After Their Own GM Promised No Changes. This Is Not a Good Look.
Two months ago, John Mozeliak walked into the Angels’ clubhouse as the new interim GM and told the coaching staff not to worry. Everybody was safe for the season, he said. Everybody could exhale.
On Tuesday, three of those coaches were out of a job.
The Angels fired pitching coach Mike Maddux, bullpen coach Don Chiti and assistant pitching coach Darryl Scott in one shot. In the release, Mozeliak said that after consulting with manager Kurt Suzuki, the front office felt “it was best to make a change” for the sake of the pitching staff. Which is a nice way of saying that the promise he made in June no longer applies.
Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times dug up the receipts. When Mozeliak took over from Perry Minasian in June and coaches asked where they stood, his answer was direct. “I told them they’re all fine for this year.” Sixty days later, three of them are cleaning out lockers.
This is a credibility problem, not a baseball problem
Look, firing pitching coaches on a 45-74 team is not exactly a shocking baseball decision. The Angels are on their way to an eleventh straight losing season. Their pitching has been a mess. Somebody had to be held responsible, and the manager was not going to be that somebody. Fine.
The problem is that the interim GM made a very specific public promise to his own people, and then broke it two months later. Coaches around the league notice things like that. Agents notice things like that. When the Angels go looking for their next pitching coach this winter, every candidate is going to remember that the last guy was told he was safe right up until the moment he wasn’t.
It also raises a bigger question. Should an interim GM be making these calls at all? Mozeliak is a placeholder. The Angels have not committed to him long-term, and Arte Moreno is expected to conduct a real GM search this offseason. Handing a placeholder the authority to fire tenured coaches on one-year deals is a strange call by ownership, especially when Mozeliak has publicly reversed himself to do it.
The optics of the past three months
What makes this land even worse is the backdrop. In late July, right before the trade deadline, Mike Trout and half a dozen teammates were photographed at a bonding golf outing on the same afternoon two players were shipped out. That was not a great look. The Angels are 29 games under .500 and just fired three coaches after saying they wouldn’t, and the manager, Kurt Suzuki, was hired in the middle of it all.
All three fired coaches were on one-year contracts, so keeping them through September was always more of a courtesy than a commitment. That is probably what Mozeliak told himself when he made this call. But there is a difference between a courtesy and a promise, and Mozeliak made the promise on the record.
What comes next
The immediate baseball impact is minimal. The staff that could not straighten out this pitching group in June is not going to fix it in August, and the replacements are going to be temporary anyway. Whoever gets hired to run the Angels for real in the offseason will bring in their own people.
The lasting impact is on trust. Free-agent coaches will look at Anaheim differently now. Ownership is going to have a harder time selling anybody on stability. And Mozeliak, if he wants the interim tag removed, just gave every reporter in Southern California a very easy question to ask on his first day of the job.
The Angels are bad on the field. On Tuesday, they got worse in the office.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
