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.