The Los Angeles Angels’ pitching staff combined to no-hit the Seattle Mariners in a 13-0 win on Friday night, the same night they paid respect to Tyler Skaggs in their first home game since his death.
Before the game, the Angels paid tribute to Skaggs with a pregame ceremony where fans observed 45 seconds of silence to match Skaggs’ jersey number before the Angels took the field with ever player wearing a jersey with Number 45 on the back and Skaggs’s last name.
But perhaps the most moving part of the ceremony was Skaggs’s mother throwing out the first pitch for a perfect strike and—believe when I tell you —left a piece of her son in that strike zone as she did.
Because that strike zone became an absolute dead zone to every Mariners player that set foot there from that moment forward, as Taylor Cole opened the game with two perfect innings before Felix Pena finished it off with seven hitless ones to complete a no-hitter in the team’s first home game since Skaggs’s tragic passing.
Want more? Great.
See, the Angels scored seven runs in the first to grab a huge lead, added two more in the second bringing them up 9-0, and, by the time the game was over, had totaled 13 runs. The results read less like a box score and more like a Hollywood screen play.
And when they do make it into one—here’s one more little note that Mike Trout pointed out in the post-game presser—the team scored seven runs in the first and thirteen,total.
Tyler’s Birthday was the following day: 7/13.
Okay, now as you fight back that lump in your throat,I’ll tell you that it was at this point that Angels players laid their Tyler jerseys on the mound.
This was the 11th no-hitter in Angels history and the first one in the history of the game where two different pitchers combined to get the win for a third.