DETROIT >> With the Angels about to head to Tampa, where Joe Maddon first established himself as a successful big league manager, Maddon spoke to the Tampa Bay Times about the Angels firing him and what he’s been doing the past two months.

Maddon, who was fired June 7, said he’s already lost his emotional ties to the Angels.

“It’s like, once that happened, I dissolved my affiliation with them,” Maddon said. “There’s no emotion anymore. There’s no anything. It’s like to me they don’t even exist, organizationally.

“I still text with a lot of the players, I text with a lot of the staff. One of them called me (Friday). So we’re staying in touch.”

The Angels were 27-29 when Maddon was fired. They have since gone 25-39.

Maddon told the Times that the Angels have some work to do in order to get back to contention. The team is on its way to its seventh consecutive losing season, and its eighth in a row without making the playoffs.

“The infrastructure needs to be improved. There’s a lot of things that need to be improved there,” Maddon said. “These guys can’t do it alone, obviously. 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