Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno's impetuosity is renowned in baseball -- from his sudden, frantic pursuit of then-free agents Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton, copious front-office changes and near-constant zigzagging of organizational priorities. So at first glance, yes: His team's 12-game losing streak looks like the perfect trigger for a volcanic boss to oust a manager.
But the team's decision to fire Joe Maddon and replace him with interim skipper Phil Nevin goes beyond Moreno -- and its roots run much deeper than the past two weeks of bad baseball.
For months, evaluators around the league had been reporting unhappiness over Maddon's day-to-day decisions, a sentiment leaking more and more frequently out of the Angels organization.
Even this winter, by the time this year's delayed spring training finally began, Maddon was regarded by many in the industry as a true lame duck, in the last year of a three-year, $12 million deal he signed before the 2020 season. That was a few months before GM Perry Minasian joined the team, which had created an element of tension among stakeholders. In the parlance of baseball -- Maddon was not Minasian's guy.
It was Moreno who had been responsible for Maddon's hiring, after forcing the firing of former manager Brad Ausmus (GM Billy Eppler was pushed out after that 2020 season). But like anyone else who had been part of nearly a decade of the Angels' unrelenting losing, Maddon had begun to fall out of favor. Before the start of the season, a former Angels official predicted, "The only way he continues is if they make the playoffs. Short of that, he's gone."
Sure enough, after two horrific weeks for the Angels, Maddon won't even have the opportunity to see if he can get the team into the postseason for the first time since 2014. Minasian confirmed Tuesday that the decision was his, made with Moreno's blessing.
The groundwork had been laid months earlier. During his time in Anaheim, Maddon had repeatedly left himself open for internal criticism with some of his choices. Most notably, over the winter, the Angels' front office had delved into the possibility of shifting Mike Trout, the face of the franchise, to a corner outfield spot. The idea was to help save wear-and-tear on Trout, as well as to make room for a player generally considered to be a better defender, Brandon Marsh.
Club executives intended to present the idea to Trout sometime after the owners' lockout of the players ended. Instead, Maddon changed the trajectory -- telling reporters about it before anyone in the organization said anything to Trout. When Trout balked at the suggestion -- he learned about it on Twitter, he said -- that possibility was scrapped for 2022 out of respect for Trout, a future Hall of Famer.
The questions about decision-making continued after the season began, even as the Angels got off to the second-best start in their history. In mid-April, Maddon made the decision to intentionally walk the Rangers' Corey Seager with the bases loaded, a decision that raised a lot of eyebrows inside and outside the Angels organization.
"Just trying to stay out of a big blow, and also just to stir the group up, quite frankly," he said then. "That's something you don't normally do, and I thought just by going out there and doing something like that, the team might respond, simple as that ... Seager's that good. So I know it's early in the game, but I thought it could have changed the momentum of the game. I thought it was the right thing to do in that moment for us."
At best, it was out-of-the-box thinking. At worst, it lacked a bedrock of logic at a time when managers are expected to defend their decisions with numbers.
Maddon has always operated just as much on feel -- and when he joined the team, interest was particularly high in how the creative-thinking manager would help Shohei Ohtani thrive as a two-way player. Maddon and Minasian collaborated in making a plan for their star, pushing aside a lot of the past health guardrails that had been put in place to protect him in his first seasons with the Angels. Maddon and his staff relied on their conversations with Ohtani in determining how to best use him as a hitter and a pitcher -- "how do you feel?" was the operative question. It worked: Ohtani won an MVP award with a historic season, the likes of which we might never see again. As Maddon said last August, it's possible that nobody could replicate it -- including Ohtani himself.
But even with that unprecedented performance, the Angels finished eight games under .500 in 2021, just as they did in 2020. Trout missed most of 2021, and third baseman Anthony Rendon -- another Moreno signing -- has been on the injured list constantly.
This year, things finally seemed different: The Angels spent much of April in first place in the AL West. Minasian had worked in the offseason to build a competitive pitching staff, partly with internal promotions but mostly with Moreno's money. Trout was back, and off to his usual MVP pace to start. But then they started losing. And losing. And losing.
The cracks that were already in place began to widen, and, after a two-week stretch in which the Angels went from the eighth-best team in baseball to the 15th, Maddon was fired.
Late in the 2015 season, Maddon's first with the Cubs, the team's front office shared a dinner, and the topic turned to the impact of the manager. Staffers took turns guesstimating how many wins he had effectively added. The numbers were substantial, and the fact that they even had such a discussion -- in a time in baseball when managers are seen as less important than ever -- said a lot about Maddon's managerial excellence.
Now, in the midst of a record-setting losing streak, Maddon is out -- fired outright as a big league manager for the first time, really. He had jumped from the Rays to the Cubs as a free agent, and his departure from the Cubs was described as a "mutual decision" after several frustrating seasons (he later said he had hoped to stay).
The 68-year-old Maddon will forever own a corner of baseball history, known as one of the best and most progressive managers in the sport and a curse-breaker in Chicago. But today, it's unclear if he'll ever have another chance to manage a team to a win in the big leagues.