DETROIT – Cincinnati Reds pitcher Wade Miley said he engaged in “no wrongdoing” in response Friday to a published report revealing court documents alleging he gave the late Tyler Skaggs prescription medicine more than a decade ago when they were teammates in Arizona.
Skaggs, the former Angels pitcher, died at 27 of a drug overdose during a team road trip in 2019. A former team official is currently serving a prison sentence for his involvement in providing drugs to Skaggs.
Thursday’s report in The Athletic included contents of a deposition from Skaggs’ former agent in which the agent testified Skaggs had told him he sometimes received prescription drugs from Miley.
The deposition is part of a wrongful death civil suit against the Angels filed by the Skaggs family.
“I hate what happened to Tyler. It sucks. My thoughts are with his family and his friends,” Miley said during a media session Friday at his locker in Detroit that lasted less than a minute and a half. “But I’m not going to sit here and talk about things that somebody might have said about me or what-not.
“I was never a witness for any of this. I was never accused of any wrongdoing. And I’m not going to sit here and and talk about something …. I’ll take baseball questions. That’s about it.”
He declined to directly answer a question about whether the testimony was true.
He said he didn’t expect the report to be a distraction as he heads into his second start for the Reds on Sunday.
And when asked whether anybody from MLB has contacted him about the issue he said, “I’d rather just focus on the Cincinnati Reds right now and baseball. And what I have to do moving forward. I have to get ready for a game on Sunday.”
And when asked a followup regarding any potential MLB process: “I said what I said about the thing,” he said. “There’s no wrongdoing. It is what it is.”
Reds officials say there’s no action warranted or planned by the team.
Miley and Skaggs were Diamondbacks teammates in 2012 and 2013.
Reds manager Terry Francona said he found out about the report “when everybody else” did.
“From where I sit, other than me caring about Miley and certainly having respect for the sadness of the family, there’s nothing for me to say,” Francona said. “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t think commenting makes a whole lot of sense.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati Reds’ Wade Miley responds to reported Tyler Skaggs drug link