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The Angels Fired Their GM, Fired Their Pitching Coach, and Are Still One of the Worst Teams in Baseball — The Problem Was Never One Guy

By Anthony Conte • September 26, 2026 • 5 min read

Three months ago, we asked whether Moreno would ever rebuild the Angels or just keep reshuffling the org chart. The answer showed up on September 8, when he sold the whole operation to Stan Kroenke. By then the roster had already failed two smaller versions of the same test, and it failed both of them the same way.

Test one: fire the general manager. Perry Minasian got walked out on June 26 with the Angels sitting at 34-48. Test two: fire the pitching coach. Mike Maddux followed him out the door on August 11, by which point the record had rotted to 45-74. ESPN reported it as a bullpen-accountability move, the kind of shakeup that’s supposed to jolt a clubhouse into playing above its talent level for the stretch run.

It didn’t. As of right now, the Angels are 62-98, with two games left on the season — tonight’s game and tomorrow’s finale. Win both and they close at 64-98. Lose both and it’s 62-100. There is no version of the next 48 hours that gets the Angels out of one of the very worst records in baseball — the Rockies have them beat on futility no matter how this weekend goes. Two front-office firings, and the season is landing in the exact place it was headed in June.

The Two-Coach Death March

We said the problem was never Minasian back in June, and the front office spent the rest of the summer proving it. Firing Minasian didn’t fix the bullpen. We said the roster was the problem when Maddux was fired too, and firing Maddux didn’t fix it either. What both moves shared was a target: the guys in charge of translating a flawed roster into wins, rather than the roster itself.

That’s not nothing. Coaching matters. But it’s a specific kind of intervention, and it has a ceiling. You can change who’s calling the pitches. You can’t change who’s throwing them.

Can a New Coaching Staff Really Fix a Depleted Roster?

No. Not by itself, anyway. The data on Maddux’s firing actually makes the case better than a straight “nothing changed” would. On the day Maddux got fired, the Angels had the worst walk rate in the majors at 11.1%. By late September, that number had fallen to 7.7%, fifth-best in the league. Reid Detmers said as much when asked about it, describing something more tangible than a pep talk when it came to fixing his outings.

So the pitching staff actually got better at the one thing coaching can directly influence. It just happened at 45-74, with 43 games left and a bullpen that had already been stripped for parts. Improving your command in September doesn’t un-lose the games you lost in May.

Credit where it’s due, then walk away from the temptation to make this a redemption arc. One better metric over six weeks doesn’t add up to a turnaround; it’s a pitching coach finally doing his job, on a roster that had already sealed its fate.

The Payroll Cuts Nobody Wants to Admit

The conversation around Minasian and Maddux tends to skip the part that actually explains the season: Arte Moreno cut the Angels’ cash payroll by roughly $80-90 million in 2026, from around $230 million down to about $138 million. Sports Illustrated tracked the drop in real time. It was a choice, not a market correction, made by an owner who traded Logan O’Hoppe at the deadline and never replaced the depth he took with him.

You can see exactly what that bought the roster in one tweet.

Seven players (Zach Neto, Mike Trout, Reid Detmers, Nolan Schanuel, Wade Meckler, Walbert Ureña, and the since-traded Jose Soriano) combined for roughly 24 WAR. Everyone else on the roster combined for -0.7. Coaching didn’t create that gap, and neither did front-office instability, at least not directly. It’s an ownership decision: gut the supporting cast and hope the stars carry the weight alone. The $90 million cut gutted the depth that turned the final week of September into a formality instead of a fight.

Zach Neto’s 5 WAR Wasn’t Enough

What Neto actually did deserves better than a footnote: the best individual season this organization has produced in years, happening on a team that’s guaranteed to finish with one of the worst records in the sport regardless of what happens these final two games. A career-high in the neighborhood of 27 home runs. Somewhere around 24 stolen bases, his third straight 20-20 season. Five wins above replacement. Locked On Angels put it plainly:

He’s outperformed baseball’s most expensive shortstops for three years running, and the team’s own postseason MVP vote wasn’t close.

None of that changes the math. One All-Star shortstop posting elite numbers next to a bench running -0.7 WAR is a gourmet food truck parked outside a building that’s on fire. Impressive on its own terms. Doesn’t put out the fire. Neto’s excellence is a real, durable thing the Angels can build around. It’s just not evidence they were close to anything this year, and pretending otherwise is how you talk yourself into another summer of standing pat.

What’s the Point of Mozeliak’s Interim Contract?

John Mozeliak is the name attached to all of this now, installed as interim GM with a contract that runs through December and not one day further. Ownership had a chance to signal conviction: hire the guy through next October, let him build a staff, commit to a plan. Instead they handed him ten weeks and a title with an expiration date stapled to it.

Moreno’s sale to Kroenke happened mid-collapse, which means the man deciding whether Mozeliak sticks around isn’t even the man who hired him. Kroenke inherits a team finishing with 98 losses at minimum, a gutted bench, and a GM on a deal built to expire before the new owner has to make a real decision about anything. That’s not a rebuild plan. It’s a way of not deciding yet, dressed up as one.

The Angels aren’t finishing near 100 losses because Perry Minasian was bad at his job or because Mike Maddux couldn’t teach a slider. They’re finishing there because the roster behind Neto, Trout, and Detmers was hollowed out on purpose, and firing the two guys standing closest to it was easier than admitting whose decision it had been.

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