Five months after Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs was found dead in 2019 with a toxic mix of alcohol, fentanyl and oxycodone in his body, Major League Baseball and the players association amended their Joint Drug Agreement to begin testing for opioids. In the two seasons of such testing, covering more than 12,000 tests, there have been no opioid-related violations, according to a source familiar with those results.
When the union agreed to testing in December 2019, executive director Tony Clark said the scope of opioid use by players was “difficult to gauge” and explained that the union decided there “wasn’t necessarily a need to take a census as much as there was taking a leadership role in the conversation.”
Violations include only non-prescribed use of opioids. The illegal use of opioids by ballplayers gained national attention this week with explosive admissions under oath by several former Angels teammates describing how easily opioids passed among them and Angels employee Eric Kay in the clubhouse before the testing was established. Matt Harvey, C.J. Cron, Mike Morin, Cam Bedrosian and Blake Parker testified that Kay, the team’s former communications director, provided them with oxycodone pills dating to late 2016 and up to Skaggs’s death on July 1, 2019.
