Los Angeles Angels: manager Joe Maddon's homecoming

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Mandatory Credit: Todd Warshaw /Allsport /

Los Angeles Angels: manager Joe Maddon’s homecoming

Maddon spent over three decades in the Angels’ organization, from minor league catcher to minor league coach and manager, to major league coach and Mike Scioscia‘s consigliere on the bench for the team’s most successful era, including their lone World Series triumph.

He can’t exactly deny that the Angels have had more than their share of loss that doesn’t all tie directly to baseball doings and undoings. A lot of it happened before Maddon joined the family:

Rookie relief pitcher Dick Wantz (dead of a brain tumor, a month after his major league debut, 1965);
Star reliever Minnie Rojas (saved a franchise-record 27 games in 1967; paralyzed permanently in the 1968 road crash that killed two of his three children);
Veteran infield backup Chico Ruiz (road accident, 1972);
Rookie lefthanded pitcher Bruce Heinbechner (road accident, 1974).

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While Maddon began plying his original catching trade, a light-hitting Angels shortstop named Mike Miley was killed in a 1977 road accident. A year after that, the Angels’ first significant signing of the free agency era, outfielder Lyman Bostock, was shot to death in a mistaken-identity crime in Indiana; the crime changed Indiana law to allow a legally insane defendant to be imprisoned regardless after his psychiatric treatment ended.

Maddon was a roving hitting instructor in the organization when haunted Donnie Moore—the relief ace who’d surrendered the fateful home run to Boston’s Dave Henderson that sent the Angels from a strike away from the World Series to extra innings and the eventual 1986 American League Championship Series loss—shot his wife and then killed himself in 1989, after his career was over.

And he had the same job when, in 1992, the chartered bus taking the Angels from the New York area to Baltimore on a road trip careened off the highway, into the woods, and injured thirteen including then-manager Buck Rodgers, who needed elbow surgery as a result.

Surely it made little sense that a team named for spiritual messengers from God should be bedeviled by that much calamity.

Maddon was the Tampa Bay Rays’ pennant-defending manager opening the 2009 season when young Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was killed by a drunk driver while he was out with friends celebrating his first win of the season. But Adenhart’s death still felt like a death in the family to a Maddon who’d left his heart in southern California after all.

Now he has the Angels’ bridge as the organization continues trying to make sense of the Skaggs tragedy, the happy-go-lucky pitcher dying of a drug overdose at last July’s beginning, turning out to have had an opioid addiction which might have begun after earlier injuries and surgeries, possibly being abetted by at least one and maybe more Angel employees, and his family preparing to take it to court if they don’t get further answers and accountability.

The Cubs’ collapse of 2019 was nothing compared to all that. And it turned out that Maddon and Cub president Theo Epstein agreed mutually that it was time for each to move onward.

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