Update: Mike Sciosca dismissed these reports as “poppycock” Sunday, which, to be honest, should get him 20 more years in MLB.
Goodbye, my almost Scioscia
Sunday’s Say Hey, Baseball is about Mike Scioscia’s long career of many faces.
Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports
The Angels pieced together nine innings of losing baseball Saturday night, a 3-0 result against Cleveland. Ken Rosenthal, baseball’s closest Adrian Wojnarowski replica, capped it off by dropping the news that Angels manager Mike Scioscia would step down at the end of the 2018 season behind The Athletics’ paywall.
The Angels’ two most recent postseason appearances were 2009 and 2014, which ended in an ALDS sweep. Scioscia’s team has a losing season streak of three years, amid another to add to that total. Though the Angels are on pace to finish near their 2017 win percentage, they sit in fourth place instead of second, surpassed by the Athletics and the Mariners. The Angels are, conservatively, down on their luck (even with Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout headlining the roster), but Rosenthal reports that there is no pressure from the club pushing Scioscia to his decision.
With the information we have to work with, the situation seems to be one of the longest-tenured managers in the league finding his opening to step away to a new role in or outside of baseball. The 59-year-old’s contract expires in 2018 after 10 years, a lot of years especially considering teams like the Nationals who would probably contract managers on a weekly basis if they could get away with it. Scioscia has been at the head of the Angels since 1999. Nineteen years is long enough to bank some good memories.
Before things soured in the later years of his leadership, Scioscia led the organization to its first and only championship. He boasts 1,625 career wins and a win percentage exceeding .500. And hey, he didn’t have nothing to do with Ohtani’s decision. Only a few years removed from accusations of being resistant to analytics and never more than a game removed from an iconic Scioscia Face, baseball will miss him if his step isn’t just to another role in baseball, but to the outside.
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