Los Angeles Angels: When team gave Skaggs a memorial no-hit blowout
By Jeff Kallman
Los Angeles Angels: the Tyler Skaggs Memorial No-Hit Blowout
The Mariners joined the Angels, showing shiploads of class, in lining up the baselines from the plate as a Tyler Skaggs jersey was placed behind the Angel Stadium pitcher’s mound in a frame. Skaggs’ widow, Carli, his mother Debbie, his stepfather Dan, and his stepbrother Garrett, made for the mound.
Then Debbie wound up and threw a ceremonial first pitch to Angels pitcher Andrew Heaney, before embracing Heaney and Mike Trout, the Angels’ all-everything center fielder suddenly emergent as the team’s no questions asked leader in the immediate aftermath of Skaggs’ unexpected death.
Those genuinely touching moments were almost nothing compared to what happened during the actual game, played in front of a likeness of Skaggs and a circular memorial displaying number 45 large on the rear end of Trout’s office, the center field fence.
How many times can you say the Angels paid their departed pitcher the most unexpectedly appropriate tribute of all—a game in which two pitchers, Taylor Cole (two innings) and Felix Pena (seven innings) combined to surrender no hits, only one walk, and see not a single Mariner reach on an error?
How often can you say Trout himself—who wept unashamedly the previous week in Texas, trying to express what his friend Skaggs meant to himself and to their team—accounted admirably for almost exactly half the Angels’ commemorative destruction?
Say it as often as you like even if you’re not an Angel fan. Because seldom if ever has a team rent by in-season tragedy responded like this when finally getting to play for the home audience after their lost teammate’s death on the road, showing him the love with their fans.
And even less often does it begin the way it did in the bottom of the first after Cole retired the Mariners in order on a strikeout, a flyout, and a ground out—dropping seven on Mariners starter Mike Leake before Matt Festa struck out Justin Upton, who’d singled earlier in the inning, swinging on a 2-2 fastball.