ARLINGTON, Texas — The schedule shows no mercy. It is one of the first rules a professional baseball player learns. Night after night, city after city, you go to the field and play. For six months, off-days are precious and scarce.
The Los Angeles Angels arrived here in Arlington on Sunday night wearing cowboy hats on the team flight. It was Tyler Skaggs’s idea. The plane landed and the players went to their suburban hotel. Skaggs, a 27-year-old pitcher, was found dead in his room there on Monday afternoon.
The Angels and the Texas Rangers postponed their game that night. Major League Baseball and the Rangers would have granted the Angels another day to absorb the shock, but the Angels said they were ready on Tuesday.
“The game itself can be a refuge for players, where they can turn their minds off and just focus on baseball,” Angels Manager Brad Ausmus said at a somber news conference before batting practice at Globe Life Park. “And I don’t know that sitting in a hotel room would do them any good.”
Ausmus paused for four agonizing seconds after the words “hotel room.” The Angels switched hotels on Monday night, leaving the Hilton where their teammate was found dead. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s office scheduled an autopsy, but there has been no announcement about a cause of death. The police have said they do not suspect foul play or suicide.
“For some reason that is incomprehensible to all of us, he lives on now only in our minds and in our hearts,” Angels General Manager Billy Eppler said. “Tyler brought joy to everybody around him. He was magnetic. People were drawn to him.”
For now, there are tributes but no answers. The Rangers held a moment of silence before the game, stenciled Skaggs’s No. 45 on the back of the mound, and played no music before the first pitch or before their at-bats. The Angels wore a patch with Skaggs’s number over their hearts, and hung his jersey in their dugout. Patrick Corbin, a Washington Nationals pitcher who was drafted by the Angels with Skaggs in 2009, wore No. 45 in his start against the Miami Marlins on Tuesday instead of his usual No. 46.
Mathis was also playing for the Angels in April 2009 when starting pitcher Nick Adenhart, 22, was killed by a drunken driver just hours after the best game of his brief career.
“It was almost like we were playing that year for him,” Mathis said of the ’09 Angels, who reached the American League Championship Series. “It was very dear to us to honor him in the best way we could every time we stepped on the field.”
On the whiteboard in the Rangers’ clubhouse Tuesday, near Mathis’s locker, was an unusual note: “Team prayer after B.P.” The Angels’ clubhouse was closed to reporters on Tuesday afternoon, and the team planned to keep it closed after the game. The players did, however, come to the conference room where Eppler, Ausmus, the team owner Arte Moreno and the team president John Carpino took questions.
“It’s like a punch in the heart,” Moreno said, adding later, “You can’t believe it. You think somebody’s there and they’re not there. The team is such a family, and when you take a piece away from the family, there’s always a hole.”
The players watched silently as the others talked. Mike Trout, the majors’ best player, pulled a red Angels hoodie over his head and bowed. Trout was drafted in the same class as Skaggs, and this is the second year in a row he has dealt with tragedy. Trout left the team last August after the death of his brother-in-law, Aaron Cox, a former Angels minor leaguer.
The players had already gathered — twice, Ausmus said — to share memories of Skaggs, to listen to the music he liked and to laugh at old stories. Mark Gubicza, a broadcaster and former pitcher, smiled as he thought of Skaggs doing the floss dance. The two of them had a silly routine, texting each other photos of their Starbucks orders before every game. They talked pitching, too.
“He was getting better and better,” Gubicza said. “He started using his changeup more to lefties. That’s one thing he told me this spring: ‘Watch me, I’m going to start throwing my changeup to lefties; it’s going to make me better.’ He was almost like a son to me.”
Skaggs had been lined up to pitch the final game of this series, on Thursday. He was eager to pitch later this month at Dodger Stadium. He rooted for the Dodgers as a boy in Santa Monica, Calif., and was heartbroken when they passed on him in the draft.
“There’s definitely a big grudge there,” Skaggs said Sunday to Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic.
This had been Skaggs’s best season; after many injuries, he had made all his starts, led the team in innings and was 3-1 with a 2.49 earned run average in his last four starts.
Now he was gone, and the Rangers watched footage of another Angels left-hander, Jose Suarez, on their clubhouse televisions as they prepared for Tuesday’s game. The schedule rolled on, without a player whose presence loomed over the ballpark.
“A 27-year-old kid,” Rangers Manager Chris Woodward said. “So much promise, so much life to live. It just makes no sense.”