Nearly two months into the season, the Angels sat at 27–17 and had the look of one of the best teams in the American League. A dozen consecutive losses later, their manager was fired, and they never got above .500 again.
With another losing season winding down, Joe Maddon has offered his version of how his Angels tenure came to an unceremonious end. In an excerpt from his upcoming book, The Book of Joe: Trying Not to Suck at Baseball and Life—co-written with Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci—Maddon detailed his relationship with Angels general manager Perry Minasian, which he says reached a breaking point on May 9 when Minasian broke a cardinal rule by calling down to the dugout mid-game and instructing Maddon to remove Mike Trout amid an Angels blowout win over the Rays.
The divide between old and new, manager and front office, data and art, Maddon and Minasian, reached a boiling point on May 9. The Angels had just scored five runs in the seventh inning against the Rays to turn a 6–3 lead into an 11–3 blowout. Ohtani hit a grand slam. The dugout was lively. Suddenly, head athletic trainer Mike Frostad walked up to Maddon at his usual perch on the top step of the dugout and said, “Perry just called down. He said get Trout out of the game.”
Earlier in the day Trout had complained about a bit of soreness in his groin. But later he told Maddon that the soreness dissipated, and he was fine.
To Maddon, Minasian broke a sacred code. The GM had called the dugout during a game to dictate strategy to the manager—a proven, veteran manager at that. To Minasian, he simply was deploying the power given to this generation of executives. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was out of bounds.
The next day Maddon blew up at Minasian in Maddon’s office. “Listen, don’t you ever f------ call down to the dugout again!” Maddon said.
Twenty-six days later, he was gone.
The rift between Maddon and Minasian was symbolic of the growing divide between front offices and coaching staffs league-wide, according to Maddon. The 68-year-old baseball lifer who won a World Series as manager of the Cubs in 2016 says that too much power and importance has been placed in analytics and technology, and not enough with coaches with decades of experience playing and teaching the game.
“Is the game being taught or is it more reliant on studying feedback from technology? The players want to hear more and more about exit velocity and spin rates from coaches, as opposed to mechanical information that only a well-trained pitching coach or hitting coach could pass along.
“Who is mentoring these groups? How is the game being passed on with the eradication of minor league teams? There is a lot of tearing of the fabric right now.”
