Firing your pitching coach in the middle of a lost season only works if anyone believes you meant it.
On Tuesday, Aug. 11, the Angels fired pitching coach Mike Maddux, assistant pitching coach Darryl Scott, and bullpen coach Dom Chiti. The move came with 43 games left on a schedule that stopped mattering months ago. The team sits at 45-74, the worst record in the majors. Nobody in Anaheim is playing for October. So what exactly is being fixed here, and for whom?
The part that guts the whole thing is timing. When John Mozeliak took over as interim general manager in June, after Perry Minasian was let go, he stood in front of reporters and told the staff they had nothing to sweat. "I met with Kurt and most of (the coaches) this morning, and I told them they're all fine for this year," Mozeliak said. "There's nothing they have to worry about. ... They all have jobs moving forward. There's no reason for massive change right away."
That was June; this is August. The same executive who handed out that assurance just cut three coaches loose. You can't read that as decisiveness. Read it as a man saying whatever kept the room calm at the time, then reversing himself the second the calendar gave him cover.
The stated reason is vague on purpose. Mozeliak said "no one thing just stood out" in the decision, then leaned on the analytics gospel: he wants the Angels to "use all the different tools that you see a lot of pitchers use today," and flagged "some level of frustration with the inconsistency of that." He added that with seven weeks left the club wants to "evaluate what additional steps are needed to elevate our entire pitching program."
There's no incident, no clash, just a buzzword, technology adoption, stretched over a decision that had already been made. That's a press release with a body count, not a baseball judgment.
It gets worse. Maddux wasn't some tired holdover the front office inherited and finally cleaned out. This is the same front office that signed him in the offseason to a one-year deal and sold him as a coup. His résumé earned that: stops with the Brewers, Rangers, Nationals, and Cardinals, and Texas starters who led the majors with a 3.41 ERA in 2025. He turns 65 later this month. A few months into the contract they gave him, he's gone. Scott was in his first season with the Angels after years with the Rockies. Chiti was in his first season as bullpen coach after rejoining the organization in late 2023. These were the front office's own hires. Firing them this fast looks less like accountability than an admission that the people doing the evaluating can't evaluate.
Now add the churn. Tim Leveque, promoted from Double-A to interim pitching coach, becomes the Angels' sixth pitching coach in seven years. Michael Wuertz slides in as interim bullpen coach. Six pitching coaches in seven years isn't a program, it's a revolving door with a bench behind it. It doesn't stop there: manager Kurt Suzuki is in his first season on a deal that expires at year's end, and if the Angels hire someone new for next year, he'd be their sixth manager in eight years.
The pitching really has been bad. Through Monday's games the staff carried a 4.51 ERA, seventh-worst in the majors, with the most walks in baseball. They've blown 20 of 36 save chances. But this isn't a Maddux problem that showed up in year one. The Angels posted a 4.89 ERA last season, 28th in the majors. The rot predates him. Cutting a coach seven weeks in doesn't touch the thing that actually has the Angels headed toward an 11th straight losing season and 12th straight without the playoffs, both the longest active droughts in the sport, all of it piled up under owner Arte Moreno.
Notice who isn't in any of these sentences: Moreno. This firing traces to Mozeliak, working with Suzuki. Mozeliak is still interim, with a lockout looming in 2027 and no long-term commitment to his name. His main line of communication, by his own account, runs to club president Molly Jolly, who hired him, not to the owner. So the man swinging the axe has no guaranteed future himself, while the man whose decade of decisions built this mess stays untouched at the top. The accountability keeps landing on the people with the least power to have caused the damage.
This firing came about a week after the Angels traded eight players off the big-league roster, a real teardown that at least pointed somewhere. Set that next to this coaching purge and the two moves don't match: one admitted the season was over and started building for later. The other pretended a mid-August staff change could fix a pitching group that's been broken for years.
I don't doubt the Angels want better pitching. Everyone wants better pitching. But you don't restore credibility by breaking a promise you made eight weeks earlier, blaming it on "tools," and shoving your sixth pitching coach in seven years into the dugout of a 100-loss-pace team. If the goal were accountability, it would start higher up the org chart than the guy they hired last winter. It doesn't. Call this what it looks like from the outside: motion where there should be a plan.
