Angels search for hope following Tyler Skaggs’ death
Can normalcy pull Los Angeles back together after tragic loss?
The rhythms of the game pulled them back in and took hold again Monday, and for that small gift, the Angels were grateful.
They gladly gave in to the tug exerted by the familiar and routine, to playing catch under a cloudless blue sky and hearing the reassuring pop of the ball as it smacked into leather gloves, to chatting as they took batting practice and smiling as they hadn’t allowed themselves to smile since pitcher Tyler Skaggs’ death July 1 hurled them into an unscripted world of mourning and aching loss.
They are not back to normal. “No. Never,” catcher Dustin Garneau said with a passionate certainty that was echoed by his teammates.
But the music in the clubhouse was a little louder Monday than it was before the game Friday, when the Angels honored Skaggs in a moving tribute and later felt his spirit feeding theirs while they pulled off an astounding combined no-hitter, all
while wearing replicas of Skaggs’ jersey. Players were no longer speaking in notably hushed tones before the game Monday. Many wore T-shirts with Skaggs’ No. 45 on the back and his favorite phrase, “We’re Nasty” on the front. Sometimes they passed his locker stall, which will be kept intact the rest of the season.
“We see his locker over there every day and I feel like there’s times I do look over there and I still see him. I can see what he’s wearing still,” reliever Justin Anderson said before the Angels rallied for a 9-6 victory over the American League West-leading Houston Astros at Angel Stadium.
“I don’t know if ‘normal’ is the right word. I don’t know if I can give you a word right now, off the top of my head or pinpoint it. But I think just us knowing that he is still here with us, and we feel his presence still, I think that’s what rejuvenates us and helps bring us to life a little bit. We think about the things he would say to encourage us or the other positive words he would say throughout the day. I think that’s the best way to describe it.”
They hoped the emotions that lifted them to a sweep of the sub-.500 Seattle Mariners last weekend would energize them against Houston as they continued a longshot pursuit of the second wild-card berth. It made perfect sense to Anderson that what he called “a magical night, a beautiful night” in the no-hitter, a businesslike win Saturday and a comeback Sunday could create “a big momentum shift” for a team that urgently needed one. Stranger things have happened.
And strange things happened again Monday, when the Angels overcame pitcher Griffin Canning’s early wildness and relentlessly chipped away at the Astros’ no-longer-formidable pitching staff. Is this what the Angels can do and who they can be, or was their comeback merely a temporary product of the surging emotions they’ve been riding? They have a lot of ground to make up and a lot of emotional healing to do, but the no-hitter Friday seemed impossible too.
Their first step, no matter what, is to throw themselves back into their old rhythms and habits and let recovery happen naturally, as much as it can.