The Los Angeles Angels reached a last-minute settlement with the family of late pitcher Tyler Skaggs, resolving a wrongful death civil suit trial in which Skaggs’ family sought to prove that the Angels were responsible for the pitcher’s death due to Skaggs taking fentanyl-laced pills provided by former team employee Eric Kay.
The trial has provided a series of lurid headlines for three months now, with the two parties trading allegations and accusations about Skaggs’ illicit behavior and supposed substance-abuse issues versus the Angels ignoring or not enforcing team policies about drug use. The Skaggs family had been seeking $118 million in lost earnings, plus the possibility of related damages.
"The Skaggs family has reached a confidential settlement with Angels Baseball that brings to a close a difficult six-year process, allowing our families to focus on healing," the family said in a statement from a piece written by Michael Rothstein of ESPN.
"We are deeply grateful to the members of this jury, and to our legal team. Their engagement and focus gave us faith, and now we have finality. This trial exposed the truth and we hope Major League Baseball will now do its part in holding the Angels accountable. While nothing can bring Tyler back, we will continue to honor his memory."
The key events that led to the settlement were (1) the jury instructions of Judge H. Shaina Colover that Skaggs would not have died if Kay hadn’t provided the pill that caused his overdose back in 2019 (2) questions from the jurors about the possibility of adding punitive damages based on the fact that there was no check box to add those on the jurors’ questionnaires.
The combination raised the strong possibility that Skaggs’ family was “winning” the trial, although no one really won in this ongoing debacle.
The Angels argued strenuously that Kay was acting on his own, while Skaggs family lawyers said that the Angels were well aware of what was happening between Kay and Skaggs and did nothing to stop it.
"We've spent two months in trial," Skaggs family attorney Daniel Dutko said during his closing argument. "At any point have the Angels taken any responsibility?"
Jurors for the trial ended up sitting through 31 days of courtroom drama that included testimony and deposition material from 44 witnesses, including Angels DH Mike Trout, multiple ex-players and various team officials, and they also viewed 312 exhibits.
Whatever the cost, the settlement allows Skaggs’ family to move on, to whatever extent that’s possible, while the Angels get to focus on baseball moves, in theory, without the omnipresent daily and weekly headlines about the trial hanging over them.
Given the outcome and some of the information and revelations that have surfaced during this trial, it’s fair to wonder why the Angels didn’t just negotiate a settlement in advance, given the overwhelming ugliness that’s been part and parcel of this trial from day one.