Joe Maddon just exposed what went wrong with the Angels culture

Los Angeles Angels fans would probably like to largely ignore the two and a half seasons that manager Joe Maddon helmed the team. The results during his tenure were not great, but Maddon recently gave a theory for why things went wrong around that time for the Angels.

Maddon said that the departure of manager Mike Scioscia, who was the manager of the team from 2000 to 2018 before he stepped down, sapped a lot of the fearlessness from the team which had a negative effect on the culture. 

Joe Maddon claims Mike Scioscia leaving created a bad culture for Angels

It’s a fair point, although one could interpret it as a deflection of blame by Maddon for why his tenure with the team didn’t go as well as hoped. It also leads one to wonder why Maddon, a guy who had won a World Series and broken a curse as manager of the Cubs just a few years prior, was unable to restore that fearlessness when he was the guy in charge.

It’s not exactly as if the Angels were doing all that great in Scioscia’s final years with the team either. They had a long record in each of his last three seasons and while 80-82 would be a borderline miracle for the current iteration of the Angels, that was not ideal for a team that had Mike Trout in his prime. The fact that Maddon inherited a roster with both Trout and Shohei Ohtani and was really not able to do anything with it reflects poorly on him so whatever point he is trying to make feels a little bit odd.

There are many who believe that 2016 Cubs team won more in spite of Maddon rather than because of him and his Angels tenure seems to corroborate that. There’s a reason he hasn’t been hired by another team since then and now seemingly spends his time making sour grapes remarks about guys who do get opportunities to be a big league manager. 

Sure, losing a manager who was such a force for the team for so long is going to hurt, but to make a comparison to another sport, the New England Patriots just made it back to the Super Bowl a few years after moving on from Bill Belichick, arguably one of the best coaches in the history of professional sports. If they can turn it around without him then any team can.

Now the Angels are trying to turn it around with new manager Kurt Suzuki. The odds are against him as the team is not expected to be very good this year and has a dearth of talent, but maybe he can change up the culture a bit and get guys to buy into whatever he is selling.