PITTSBURGH — Sentencing for former Los Angeles Angels communications director Eric Kay is set for June 28, right about the moment the 60-day suspension Major League Baseball imposed on pitcher Matt Harvey this week is set to expire, and that's just one of a thousand or more perverse coincidences in one of the saddest baseball stories in recent memory.
Kay is looking at 20 years to life for his starring role in the fentanyl-fueled demise of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who turned up dead in a Texas hotel room three years ago this summer. Harvey might have had a role, too, but his testimony under immunity at Kay's trial seemed designed to cast him as a mere extra.
You'll probably remember Harvey from his days with the New York Mets, for whom he was decidedly not a mere extra. For a franchise with a living legacy of great pitchers, he set a club record with 11 strikeouts in his debut performance. He was New York's first draft pick in 2010, six slots after Bryce Harper, 16 before Christian Yelich, both future MVPs. By 2015, he'd folded himself most comfortably into the city's celebrity culture, a life of models and Maseratis. He reveled in his cool-as-hell media moniker, the Dark Knight of Gotham. Though it would all but vaporize in the summers to come from a toxic cocktail of cocaine, opioids, injuries, and incompetence, Harvey surely had his moment.
