Los Angeles Angels: When team gave Skaggs a memorial no-hit blowout

Los Angeles Angels: the Tyler Skaggs Memorial No-Hit Blowout

“This,” tweeted pitcher Marcus Stroman, then still a Toronto Blue Jay, whom Skaggs had beaten half a month before his death, “is unbelievable. The baseball gods.”

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Nobody seemed to care for the smaller details of the night, such as the Angels going 7-for-20 with runners at second base or better including Trout’s 3-for-4. Nobody seemed to care (too much) that, between them, Cole and Pena threw 63 strikes out of 103 pitches, with Cole striking out a pair and Pena punching out six.

Leave those details plus the Mariners’ seven pitchers combining to surrender eight earned runs, punching out eleven, but walking seven, to the statisticians. Because other than the surrealistic final score, and the absence of Mariners hits, nobody cared about any numbers above and beyond the 45 on the Angels’ backs Friday night.

Nobody cared about anything other than one baseball team coming home from a heartbroken road trip, seeing the massive makeshift memorial to their fallen teammate outside the home plate entrances to their ballpark, and taking a little extra incentive they hardly needed, considering, to suit up and give him a sendoff he couldn’t have imagined but surely hoped wouldn’t come for decades yet to be.

Decades he’ll see only from heaven.

With Skaggs’ clubhouse locker fully stocked and the team intending to keep it that way the rest of the season, the Angels had one more tribute to make after the game. They went out to the mound and covered it in Skaggs jerseys. Leaving the big 45 behind the pitching rubber exposed. There was nothing more they could possibly do.

Whether the Angels went from there to the postseason, even though they now sat in rear-view enough distance five and a half games and five teams away from a wild card slot, almost didn’t matter. On that Friday night, saying one more farewell to a pitcher they loved on the mound and even more as a young man, the Angels were bigger than baseball. And baseball didn’t seem to mind one bit.

Note: The foregoing is adapted partially from an essay the author published last year.