Amid a lost season and on pace for a franchise-record number of losses, the Los Angeles Angels have fired veteran pitching coach Mike Maddux, bullpen coach Dom Chiti and assistant pitching coach Darryl Scott.Entering Tuesday, the club’s pitchers have posted a 4.51 ERA this season — 24th in baseball.Tim Leveque, who had been serving as the Double-A pitching coach, will be the interim pitching coach for the rest of the season. Michael Wuertz, who had been the minor-league assistant pitching coordinator, will be the interim bullpen coach.“After spending time discussing with (manager Kurt Suzuki) where we are as a coaching staff and where we want to go in the future, we felt it was best to make a change,” John Mozeliak, the club’s baseball operations consultant, said in a news release. “With seven weeks remaining, we plan to use this time to evaluate what additional steps are needed to elevate our entire pitching program and best position us for success moving forward.”
It has been a summer of change in Anaheim. General manager Perry Minasian was fired in June, with Mozeliak — the long-time head of the St. Louis Cardinals — put in charge on an interim basis. At the time, Mozeliak said the coaching staff was safe through the end of the season.At the trade deadline, the Angels acted more aggressively in selling than they had under Minasian, most notably dealing starter José Soriano to the Toronto Blue Jays for a package of prospects headed by shortstop Arjun Nimmala.Maddux, 64, had been hired last winter after spending the previous three seasons with the Texas Rangers. This marked his 24th consecutive season employed as a major-league pitching coach, including tenures in Milwaukee, Texas, Washington and St. Louis. In half of those seasons, Maddux’s team qualified for the postseason. He was the pitching coach for all three Rangers teams to win the pennant, including the 2023 championship team.After a prolonged period of relative stability under Mike Scioscia, the Angels have had seven managers in the last nine years and now seven different pitching coaches.
