RIP Tyler Skaggs

Let's go a little easy on the whole mourning "charade" thing. His dealer was a team employee. There are implications that two other employees knew.

That doesn't mean the players knew... and even if they did, they still lost their friend. It doesn't make the mourning any less genuine.

I've had two friends/co-workers drink themselves to death in the past few years. One was a full-blown raging alcoholic -- lost jobs, wife left him, repeated DUIs, spent a month in a coma before a recovery, the whole nine. When he died it was still gut-wrenching.

The other one? She died in her sleep. Her room was apparently buried in vodka bottles. No one had a clue. Worked alongside her for years and didn't see anything.

 

That's a bold pronouncement, Cotton (Mather).

 

According to this story, his dealer was the team's director of communications.

Tyler Skaggs’ oxycodone dealer was the Angels’ director of communications: report

 

...and that guy told the sainted Tim Mead.

Things could get even messier. Or, MLB will make sure Arte and Co. just cut a ginormous check and it all gets swept under a halo-labeled rug.

 

This is gonna be worse than the Pittsburgh Pirates drug trials, no?

 

yep, this ain't a broom-pushing janitor or cigar-chomping sanitation guy. This is a shirt-and-tie, 0ffice-nameplate dude.

 

The director of communications sounds like a guy that was dealing with his own addiction stuff. Obviously not great that he was supplying Skaggs, but I think the team could argue that it was two employees doing drugs together, they didn't necessarily know or condone, etc.

If there is a paper trail proving that Mead knew, then I think the Angels are in all sorts of deep shit with multiple parties. And especially if Mead changes his stance from, "Hey I knew nothing" to "Hey I told X, Y and Z above me."

 

I don't have experience with addiction, but I've read enough stuff (David Simon's books, Beautiful Boy and its counterpart, Tweak by Nic Sheff). It's not really unusual for addicts to "deal" or to supply one another, and historically, that's viewed in a differently light by (sympathetic) folks than, say, someone doing it solely for profit.

The thing about pro teams providing pain killers on the down low to players seems like something that almost surely happens, especially in football. And obviously way different circumstances, but similar to Penn State, a bunch of this is going to come down to who knew what, who did they then inform, and what was their obligation to push the matter. (And obviously - a shit ton of this is all murky.)

 

Stuff like this always fascinates me, as one who has never sold nor procured drugs. How does that transaction happen? Is it Skaggs going to the PR guy and saying, "Bro, got any oxy?" Or PR guy going to Skaggs with, "Need any oxy?" How does one know to ask the other?

 

The SM Observer is never going to break major stories. It's a free weekly throwaway, more of a calendar paper. I don't know the guy who wrote the story, or how he got it, or how it got into the SM Observer. If you look at his current post on their website, you can see he can't freaking write.

One of the first things I wondered when this story broke was how Kay got addicted. The ESPN story quotes his mom saying that he got addicted to Oxy after his father died. What kind of pain is this? Weird.

The story says they have been using Oxy for at least two years. I would think that the Fentanyl probably is what killed him and there was nothing in the story that said Kay got it for Skaggs, only Oxy. Fantastic reporting by ESPN, but that is a major hole in this story.

I questioned at the beginning of this thread how many guys who had Tommy John surgery wind up on Oxy? I bet there is a bunch. How many TJs are there per year, a couple of dozen? And we never hear about the guys in the minors.