Joe Maddon was fired as manager of the Los Angeles Angels on June 7, ending a longtime association with the franchise. In a new interview, Maddon suggests that association is over for good.
Maddon played in the Angels organization from 1975 to 1979, then coached within the organization through 2005, totaling 31 years with the team. He returned as manager in 2020, which lasted until June. Those ties, according to Maddon, are broken now that he has been fired.
“It’s like, once that happened, I dissolved my affiliation with them,” Maddon told Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times. “There’s no emotion anymore. There’s no anything. It’s like to me they don’t even exist, organizationally.”
Maddon said he is still on excellent terms with some members of the team and coaching staff. However, the 68-year-old hinted at issues he sees in how the organization is run.
“The infrastructure needs to be improved. There’s a lot of things that need to be improved there,” Maddon said of the Angels. “… It’s the non-sexy stuff that has to get better. It’s not just bright, shiny objects — they have that.
“They need to do the infrastructure better in order to get to where we had been in the past. That was my goal, to get the Angels back to where we had been in the past. That was it. Nothing but pure intentions. I was an Angel. They had every ounce of me. And now that’s done.”
Maddon sounds a bit frustrated and bitter over his ouster. That is understandable in some ways. He spent a major portion of his baseball life with the team and it came to an incredibly abrupt end two months ago.
On the other hand, the Angels were not performing under Maddon. They have performed worse under interim manager Phil Nevin though. Perhaps Maddon could have fixed things given time, but the organization never looked completely devoted to him anyway.
