Reese Kaplan -- Shady Clubhouse Personnel

This weekend the news came down that the Los Angeles Angels’ late pitcher Tyler Skaggs received the opiate oxycodone from a team employee with the knowledge of the Angels hierarchy.  Even more disturbing is that they were aware of five other Angels players abusing these narcotics.  This information was provided by Angels Communications Director Eric Kay who is said to be the one who supplied the pitcher with the drugs.  He's currently out on rehab but still on the Angels' payroll for the time being as the team President, John Carpino, released a statement contradicting what was said in the report to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. 

Regardless of who said what to whom and the number of players implicated, it’s not going to change the unfortunate circumstances of Skaggs’ death.  On July 1^st of 2019 Skaggs was found dead in a Texas hotel room when the team was in town to play the Rangers.  He had a toxic combination of oxycodone, fentanyl and alcohol in his bloodstream.  The coroner listed his cause of death as choking on his own vomit. 

The NY Mets, of course, went through a similar situation with a clubhouse employee named Kirk Radomski who later admitted he was supplying Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) to several Mets players as well as others in organized baseball.  From 1985 to 1995 he was on the Mets payroll and later became a central figure in the infamous Mitchell Report in which he testified, naming names of several prominent players who were his customers. 

During the course of his career Radomski estimated that he had supplied PEDs to more than 300 players, including star players like Kevin Brown, Eric Gagne, Todd Hundley, Paul Lo Duca and Miguel Tejada.  Mike Stanton who played for both the Mets and Yankees was one of the first to be implicated in Radomski’s sideline business. 

He was just the beginning of the PED chain.  There was a personal trainer by the name of Brian McNamee who during the Mitchell Report hearings said that he had personally supplied illegal drugs to Roger Clemens, Chuck Knoblach and Andy Pettite. 

When Radomski authored a booked called Bases Loaded about the steroid era in the major leagues, he alleged that many player agents gratefully accepted his help for their clients in order to ensure better stats and paydays.  He also claims that Bud Selig, then commission of baseball, knowingly turned a blind eye to the problem during the McGwire/Sosa home run chases because it was bringing a new level of excitement to baseball.  Sosa had gone from a 160 pound player to a 230 pound player in a very short period of time yet no one sought an explanation.

Radomski’s sordid tales of the clubhouse included helping Dwight Gooden twice comply with urine tests by arranging to substitute clean samples to pass off as Gooden’s own.  He claims his distribution business didn’t really start until after he left the Mets, though he did implicate first baseman Diego Segui and centerfielder Lenny Dyskstra for getting PEDs from him while he was still on the Mets’ payroll.

The point is that clubhouse personnel with the Mets and now apparently with the Angels are sometimes involved in some very shady business, whether it was supplying illegal drugs, keeping players wives’ & girlfriends’ paths from crossing, or finding suitable, ahem, companionship for the players on the road.  It’s probably well beyond time that teams make a more concerted effort to find out exactly what’s going on under their roofs.