Joe Maddon has specialized in turnarounds across his 14 seasons as a full-time major league manager. He turned one perennial loser into a pennant winner and guided another to its first championship in more than a century. When a team hires Maddon, it gets a new identity — and no team needs that more than the Los Angeles Angels.

The Angels named Maddon as their manager on Wednesday, reuniting the franchise with a prodigal son who started his professional career with 31 years under the halo, as the team likes to say. That halo was badly tarnished this season, and it will take more than a hip, irreverent manager to restore it.

Maddon, 65, replaces Brad Ausmus, who lasted only a year in the job. Maddon has led the Tampa Bay Rays and the Chicago Cubs to the World Series, winning it with the Cubs in 2016. He infuses his teams with a quirky, forward-thinking spirit, grounded by decades of instructing at all levels of the game. In the Angels, though, Maddon confronts an uncomfortable challenge.

The organization has been rocked this year, first by tragedy and then by a scandal accompanying it. On July 1, one of the team’s best pitchers, Tyler Skaggs, died in his Texas hotel room, and an autopsy revealed he had fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol in his system at the time. The Skaggs family hired a prominent Houston lawyer, Rusty Hardin, to assist in an investigation that has focused at least partly on the team’s role in Skaggs’s death.