Jury hears family of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs blame team for OD death

SANTA ANA, Calif. (CN) — More than six years after Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs died alone in a Texas hotel room from a drug overdose, attorneys for his family finally got the chance to tell a jury the MLB team is to blame for allowing its drug-dealing communication director to remain in his job.

Shawn Holley, an attorney representing Skaggs’ widow and parents, said in her opening statement Tuesday that Angels officials had known for years that Eric Kay was abusing drugs and selling them to their players. Yet, in spite of their official policy to maintain a safe and drug-free workplace, the team never disciplined Kay and gave him unfettered access to the clubhouse and the players.

“For reasons that are beyond comprehension, the Angels decided to let Eric Kay travel to Texas with the team,” Holley told the jurors in California state court in downtown Santa Ana. “This was a reckless and egregious decision — Tyler Skaggs died in a hotel room within hours after arriving in Texas.”

Skaggs was 27 when he died after taking a counterfeit oxycodone pill, laced with fentanyl, that Kay had sold him. On July 1, 2019, he was found unresponsive in a hotel room in Texas, where the Angels were visiting for a series against the Rangers.

Kay was charged with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and distribution of a controlled substance resulting in death. Following a jury trial, he was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to 22 years in federal prison.

Holley told the jurors that top Angels officials — including former Vice President of Communication Tim Mead and current traveling secretary Tom Taylor — had been aware of Kay’s drug addiction for years and had been informed, including by Kay’s own wife, that he was supplying at least six players with opioids.

After an incident in 2013 at Yankee Stadium in New York, when Kay was found crying and sweating profusely at the back of the press box, he told Angels officials that he was addicted to Vicodin, taking five pills a day, and begged them for help, the attorney said.

“He faced no discipline and no consequences for using opioids at work, and he wasn’t made to go to rehab,” Holley said.

The Angels continued to fail to address Kay’s drug abuse even though he was frequently high on job and the incidents piled up over the years, Holley told the jurors.

Just two months before Skaggs’ death in 2019, Kay had to be hospitalized after he was so high at work that he was dancing around shirtless, the attorney said. At the hospital, the staff worried he might be suicidal because of the large amount of drugs in his system, she said.

Yet, the Angels allowed him back at work after he spent five weeks in outpatient treatment and didn’t require him to do any drug tests or require a fitness-for-duty certificate, the lawyer argued.

Holley downplayed Skaggs’ use of opioids as something he and other players did to manage the pain from playing professional baseball in order to perform at top level. He wasn’t a drug addict, she argued, because that would have prevented him from pitching at the major league level.

Todd Theodora, the lead attorney for the Angels, gave the jury an entirely different account of Skaggs’ death.

The pitcher, Theodora said in his opening statement, died from a lethal cocktail of alcohol, oxycodone and fentanyl that was only partly provided by their communications director. Skaggs had the equivalent of 11 to 13 drinks during the fatal binge, obtained the oxycodone from another source than Kay, and he snorted the grounded-up oxycodone pills and the counterfeit pills with fentanyl rather than swallow them, which is more toxic.

“Tyler Skaggs was playing Russian roulette with his life that night,” Theodora said.

Moreover, according to the Angels’ lawyer, Skaggs had been using illicit drugs before he joined the team in 2013 from the Arizona Diamondbacks, and introduced five of his teammates to unprescribed use of opioids. The Angeles didn’t know he was using drugs until after his overdose death, Theodora said.

When the Angels found out weeks later that Kay had been with Tyler that night when the pitcher was snorting drugs. he said, they immediately turned him over to the authorities.

Theodora rejected the family’s claim that the Angels had been long aware of Kay’s drug abuse, telling the jury that the longtime employee was using prescription drugs for mental health issues and that occasionally he had acted oddly because of the interaction of over-the-counter cold medication with his prescription drugs.

That was the case in 2019, when Kay went into outpatient treatment, the attorney said. When he came back, he was a new man and had a spring in his step.

“You don’t terminate someone who’s done the right thing,” Theodora said, adding that specifically applies to someone who has a mental disability. “That would have been wrong.”

He also rejected the idea that baseball players will routinely use opioids on their own accord to make it through the season . A centerfielder hustling to prevent a home run wouldn’t appreciate it if the pitcher who gave up the hit was an opioids user, according to the attorney.

The parents and widow of the deceased pitcher sued the Angels in 2021, arguing that the organization had known that Kay had a history of drug abuse and had been selling pills to Skaggs, as well as to his teammates.

“Without question, the Angels knew or should have known that, for more than two years, Kay was obtaining, storing and supplying illicit drugs not only to Tyler, but to at least six other Angels’ players, which at one point in time was 23% of the team’s active roster,” Skaggs’ family argued in the most recent version of their complaint. “Despite all of this, the Angels still asked Kay to accompany the team on the fateful trip to Texas in June 2019. The Angels sent Kay to Texas unsupervised and gave Kay complete access to players, day and night, both on and off the field. This was a fatal mistake.”

The family was initially seeking at least $210 million, but that number has risen considerably after four years of litigation. According to the Angels, the plaintiffs are going to be asking for more than $1 billion, though the plaintiffs deny this.

The civil trial is expected to last two months, and will feature testimony from a number of current and former MLB players, including three-time MVP Mike Trout, as well as pitcher Andrew Heaney, a close friend of Skaggs, and possibly future Hall of Fame hitter Albert Pujols.

Follow @edpettersson