Los Angeles Angels: Tyler Skaggs’s death has gone to a Texas grand jury
Tyler Skaggs’s death in Texas last July shocked the Angels and all of MLB. A grand jury probe is likely to turn up more disturbing facts.
Tyler Skaggs‘s death last July rocked baseball whole and his Los Angeles Angels in particular. Now the overdose death of the 27-year-old lefthander in a Texas hotel turned toward possible criminal charges. A Texas grand jury has convened to hear evidence, particularly about whether Angels officials knew Skaggs had an opioid addiction.
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If wrongdoing among team officials is discovered with or without an actual criminal conviction, the Los Angeles Times says, Skaggs’s family could still use the information in a civil lawsuit worth millions against anyone found to have any responsibility in his death.
The Times‘s Bill Shaikin also says no Angels players were called to talk to the grand jury as of Monday, and nobody knows just yet what the grand jury has received from prosecutors in the case. But Angels pitcher Andrew Heaney told the Times over the weekend that Skaggs’s teammates didn’t believe he had a drug problem.
“If anybody felt like he had a problem, and it was obvious, we would have said something,” Heaney told the Times. “I don’t think he did. I still believe that, to this day. Trust me, I’ve thought about it a million times.”
Heaney and several of his teammates don’t like the implications that Tyler Skaggs was nothing more than an opioid addict, implications that began when the toxicology report on his death was released near the end of last August. Neither did Skaggs’s family when they hired a Texas attorney at the same time to help them determine for dead last certain how he died.
Los Angeles Angels: Tyler Skaggs’s death has gone to a Texas grand jury
Those Culpable in Skaggs’ Death
The Angels went to Texas for a set with the Rangers just before the All-Star break when Tyler Skaggs was found dead. The toxicology report forced one and all to ask honestly whether Skaggs acted on his own or whether he had persuasive help from someone thinking he or she was doing the pitcher a pain management favor.
Then-Angels communications director Eric Kay told federal Drug Enforcement Agency investigators he’d given the lefthander three of six oxycodone pills obtained illegally before the Los Angeles Angels left on that road trip. Kay also said he’d used oxy with Skaggs for a long time prior to that. He left the Angels and enrolled in a substance abuse program.
According to his mother, Kay retained counsel out of fear he might be scapegoated for the pitcher’s death. Shaikin says he hasn’t been called to talk to the Texas grand jury yet. But last October Kay issued a troubling public statement:
I felt and continue to feel that it is time for everyone to stand up and take responsibility for their respective roles in this. Nothing anyone does will ever provide closure for the Skaggs family. I can’t, the Angels can’t, and the courts can’t, regardless of what happens there. But at least I can help them “know”‘ instead of “wonder.” My hope is that there is some peace in that for them.
Kay also suggested two Angel officials—his former boss, Tim Mead, now president of the Hall of Fame, and the team’s traveling secretary Tom Taylor—knew Skaggs had a drug problem. Both men denied knowing any such thing when asked. Four Angels players including Heaney also talked to DEA investigators but haven’t disclosed details of those talks while the investigations continue.
It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that Skaggs became hooked on opioids after first being given them under purely medical circumstances. He had an injury history.
Los Angeles Angels: Tyler Skaggs’s death has gone to a Texas grand jury
A History of Injuries
After the Arizona Diamondbacks dealt him back to the Angels for 2014 (he’d gone to the Snakes with current Washington Nationals pitcher Patrick Corbin in a previous deal for pitcher Dan Haren), Skaggs pitched eighteen games before his elbow sent him to Tommy John surgery.
He missed the entire 2015 season recovering and rehabbing, returned to start ten games in 2016, then missed over three months in 2017 with an oblique strain. He opened 2018 with sixteen starts and a 2.64 earned run average before his adductor muscle gave out to cost him three more months. And he missed most of April 2019 after three season-opening starts thanks to a left ankle sprain.
The toxicology report described Skaggs as “[a] normally developed, well-nourished and well-hydrated large build adult.” What the report couldn’t determine was whether and to what extent he remained in pain, physical or otherwise. He was known otherwise as a very likable fellow, freshly married when spring training began last year, with everything else to live for, too.
He loved his young wife, Carli; he loved his teammates who loved him back; he loved the game. That was no mere show when a hurricane of grief whipped around baseball after the news of his death. Or, when the Rangers courteously painted 45—Skaggs’s uniform number—behind their mound in the Angels’ lettering style as a show of respect.
Or, especially, when the Angels returned to Anaheim after the All-Star break. First, they paid a very public and touching pre-game tribute to Skaggs by one and all wearing jerseys with his name and number on their backs for the game.
Then, they stunned the Seattle Mariners, Angel Stadium, and baseball itself by throwing a combined no-hitter (Taylor Cole pitched two innings, Felix Pena pitched the final seven) and a 13-0 blowout at the Mariners. Which only began when Mike Trout—the all-everything center fielder emergent as a team leader in the immediate wake of Skaggs’s death—batted in the bottom of the first with David Fletcher aboard on a leadoff double and sent one over center field fence.
“This,” tweeted pitcher Marcus Stroman, then still with the Toronto Blue Jays before his trade to the New York Mets, “is unbelievable. The baseball gods. Love this!” Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander was just as exuberant in his own tweet: “Absolutely incredible!! It is bigger than baseball. Meant to be.”
On that July 12 night, one day before Skaggs would have turned 28, the Angels were bigger than baseball itself. The question now is whether the grand jury probe into the pitcher’s death, atop other investigations including by Skaggs’s family, will leave the Angels feeling lower than the lawns on which they play the game.
Los Angeles Angels: Tyler Skaggs’s death has gone to a Texas grand jury
Maddon Under More Pressure Than He Thinks
It was already a maelstrom into which new Angels manager Joe Maddon walked when he accepted the job and returned to the team for whom he served long and well as former skipper Mike Scioscia‘s consigliere on the bench.
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Maddon should have had to worry about nothing more than bringing the team together under a new bridge commander, solving pitching issues, pondering percentages and execution on the field. But he has to worry about keeping a team together amidst continuing investigations and potential revelations about a popular teammate dead a little over half a year.
He even has to ponder ramifications should it prove any Angel player past or present knew Skaggs was in trouble and did or said little to nothing to help.
“This was a young man in pain,” wrote USA Today baseball columnist Bob Nightengale when the toxicology report emerged. “Perhaps more physical than even the doctors and trainers knew. Maybe more mental than even any team therapist knew. It will be a bigger tragedy if we never understand why. Prescription painkillers are a scourge in this country, and professional sports—with catastrophic injuries and the expectation to play through the pain they cause—are ripe for potential abuse.”
Exactly how ripe in Skaggs’s case is what his family, federal drug investigators, and now a Texas grand jury wants to know.
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Whatever the answers prove to be, they’re going to cut soul deep. For his family, for a Los Angeles Angels franchise steeped in too-often tragedy before Tyler Skaggs, and for baseball itself.