John Mozeliak had a choice on August 11: talk about why a 45-74 team, the worst record in baseball, still can’t develop pitching, or fire the guy standing closest to the mound. He picked the easier conversation. Pitching coach Mike Maddux, bullpen coach Dom Chiti, and assistant pitching coach Darryl Scott are all out, and the Angels front office gets to spend the next six weeks talking about analytics instead of the farm system that put this roster here in the first place.
The Easiest Accountability Move Available
Mozeliak didn’t dress it up as a purge. He told reporters the decision came “after spending time discussing with Kurt 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.” Forty-three games remained in the season. That’s not a rebuild window. That’s a message.
The actual complaint, when Mozeliak got specific, was narrower than the “data-driven reset” headlines suggested. Talking to Yahoo Sports, he said “there was just this undercurrent of trying to get ourselves to be using all the different tools that you see a lot of pitchers use today,” and admitted he wasn’t sure the staff was “truly taking advantage” of what was already available. Hitting coaches Brady Anderson and John Mabry kept their jobs, because in Mozeliak’s telling, they were using the tech properly. Tim Leveque took over as interim pitching coach, Michael Wuertz the bullpen.
What Firing Maddux Actually Solves (Not Much)
To be clear about who got fired: Maddux pitched 15 years in the majors and has coached pitchers since 2000, most recently helping Texas win the 2023 World Series. Whatever his relationship with iPads, that’s not a resume you build by ignoring the modern game entirely. Players have grumbled for a while that he leaned old-school, and the front office apparently agreed enough to move on.
And the early results look good, if you squint. Since the firings, the pitching staff has posted the second-best ERA in baseball, the best WHIP, and the lowest opposing batting average.
Since the firing of the Mike Maddux, Dom Chiti, and Darryl Scott, we have the second best ERA (2.00), best WHIP (0.84), best opposing batting average (.171), and the 4th best FIP (3.19). pic.twitter.com/DAmAKU8P6X
— Det Collector (@Det_Collector) August 19, 2026
Eight games. That’s the sample. A 2.00 ERA over a week is the kind of thing that regresses the moment a real lineup shows up. Calling it proof the coaching staff was the problem skips past the part where this team lost 74 games with these same pitchers on the mound.
The Real Problem Mozeliak Still Won’t Address
None of this touches the actual issue in Anaheim. The farm system keeps failing to produce arms capable of holding up a rotation, and the roster construction under ownership has been broken for years. Firing three coaches is cheap and fast. Fixing player development, or admitting the front office has misjudged pitching talent for a decade, is neither. Mozeliak came over from St. Louis with a mixed track record of his own, not a reputation as the guy who fixes broken pitching pipelines from scratch.
Mike Trout, still owed his prime back after all these lost seasons, doesn’t get his roster overhauled by an interim pitching coach change. He gets another six weeks of watching the organization treat the coaching staff as the scapegoat while the deeper questions about who’s drafting and developing these arms stay exactly where they’ve always been: untouched.
