As the Los Angeles Angels face a civil trial over the tragic death of their pitcher Tyler Skaggs, baseball finds itself confronting a longstanding and complicated relationship with performance-enhancing and pain-managing substances—a narrative as old as the sport itself. Skaggs died in 2019 from an accidental overdose of fentanyl-laced pills, and the trial is shining a harsh light on how baseball, its teams, and its culture have historically grappled with the use of chemicals to endure the grueling demands of the game.
The story of baseball and drugs begins not with modern steroids or opioids, but with an unusual and now almost unbelievable episode dating back to August 1889. James Francis “Pud” Galvin, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, was nearing the end of a long and punishing career. At 32, his arm was worn out after nearly 5,000 innings pitched. In search of renewed strength, Galvin publicly accepted an injection of an experimental elixir derived from animal testicles, concocted by French-Mauritian doctor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard. The doctor claimed this extract would make men stronger and more virile. Galvin’s performance the very next day—a five-hit shutout against the Boston Beaneaters, with a double and triple at the plate—was hailed as proof of the elixir’s power.
At the time, no one labeled Galvin’s booster as cheating. Instead, it was seen as an extension of the athlete’s will to push beyond natural limits, a tradition in baseball that has always blurred the lines between endurance, effort, and enhancement. This blurred boundary has persisted throughout the sport’s history, morphing with the changing chemistry of available substances but never disappearing.
Fast forward to the present, and the tragic death of Tyler Skaggs echoes that same tension. Skaggs was a 27-year-old pitcher struggling with injuries and pain, trying to keep his career alive. The pills he took, provided by Eric Kay—the Angels’ former communications director who was convicted for supplying the counterfeit, fentanyl-laced oxycodone—were meant to keep him going. The ongoing civil trial involves Skaggs’s family suing the Angels for negligence, arguing the team ignored warning signs about Kay’s drug addiction and failed to enforce its own drug policies. The defense counters that Skaggs’s death resulted from his own reckless choices.
The trial unfolds amidst the World Series celebrations of the Angels’ cross-town rivals, underscoring baseball’s complicated coexistence of triumph and tragedy. The case is more than a legal battle; it is a reflection of baseball’s centuries-old pharmacological journey—a journey shaped by players’ desperate attempts to manage pain, enhance focus, and maintain longevity in a sport unlike any other.
Baseball’s grueling nature demands nearly year-round commitment. A regular season spans 162 games, often stretching beyond 200 with spring training and playoffs. Players endure relentless travel, weather disruptions, and physical wear and tear. Unlike many sports that reward bursts of brilliance, baseball prizes availability—the ability to simply keep showing up. This culture of persistence has long driven players to seek chemical aids to supplement their natural endurance.
After World War II, amphetamines, known as “greenies,” became a clubhouse staple, as common as black coffee or chewing tobacco. Players used these stimulants to battle fatigue and maintain alertness. Jim Bouton, author of the classic baseball memoir Ball Four, described bowls of white pills alongside doughnuts before games. Hall of Famers like Willie Mays reportedly kept liquid amphetamines in their lockers. These drugs didn’t necessarily enhance physical strength but gave players the mental belief that they could keep pushing through exhaustion—the essence of baseball’s ethos of grit.
The sport’s relationship with drugs has often veered into the bizarre and the tragic. In 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis famously threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. He later recounted hallucinating that Richard Nixon was the umpire and Jimi Hendrix was at bat. Despite walking eight batters and hitting another, Ellis gave up no hits in one of baseball’s rarest feats. His story, a mixture of genius and madness, encapsulates baseball’s uneasy embrace of mind-altering substances as tools for performance.
The 1980s brought a cocaine epidemic to baseball, highlighted by the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials that exposed a league awash with illicit