The Los Angeles Angels lost 100 games, and it's time for Kurt Suzuki to go.
The Seattle Mariners beat the Los Angels Angels in the season finale on Sunday, and the Mariners knew what to do after a disappointing season that saw them finish ten games under .500 and out of the playoffs in a bad division. They just fired manager Dan Wilson, which was a tough decision after last year’s stirring playoff run, but managerial decisions happen quickly these days.
The Angels need to do the same. It’s Black Monday in baseball, and Halos fans shouldn’t have to wait for manager Kurt Suzuki to be fired. It needs to happen immediately to show that changes are coming.
Will it happen? Who knows? New owner Stan Kroenke is the man behind the curtain right now, with interim GM John Mozeliak calling the shots and most of the moves having taken place at the trade deadline.
Mozeliak has said nice things about Suzuki, but that should be a pro forma professional courtesy. We know Kroenke will be running the team in Q1 of 2027, but we still don’t know whether Mozeliak will be staying on as the permanent GM. Arte Moreno is still occupying the ownership chair, which means no one is safe from a bad decision.
It would be nice if the new owner would make a statement about all this, but from everything we know about Kroenke he tends to operate quietly behind the scenes.
As far as Suzuki goes, it’s almost impossible to defend the idea of keeping him. He looks like he could be a competent manager, but it was tough to tell given the garbage roster he stepped into, and this was a situation where no manager could have succeeded.
But Suzuki didn’t do well around the margins. He lost 100 games, he failed to develop talent like Oswald Peraza and Denzer Guzman after they both got off to strong starts, and the bullpen stayed a mess from start to finish.
Suzuki struggled to explain many of his in-game decisions, as Sam Blum of The Athletic and others have noted, and there’s nothing about his performance that jumps out and says “we need to keep this guy.”
Firings like this are mostly symbolic, but they’re important. They tell fans that competent people are in charge after a bad year, and they’re seeing the same things the fan base was forced to watch. That’s especially important for the Angels given the last decade, so it’s an important smoke signal for Stan Kroenke to send out.
