MLB's 'Official Pharmaceutical Partner' sponsored the Wild Card Series (and the opioid crisis)

Forty thousand and seven-hundred: that’s the number of strikeouts recorded during the 2026 Major League Baseball season, and the ninth straight year¹ of at least 40,000 K’s. For many players and fans, the number represents something between a triumph of pitchers throwing harder than ever, and a byproduct of hitters swinging for the fences just to keep up.

But for AbbVie, the league’s swollen whiff rates have been a prime opportunity for the pharmaceutical giant to increase its visibility. 

Following a successful 2025 campaign with the Chicago Cubs, MLB started the 2026 season by crowning AbbVie its first-ever “Official Pharmaceutical Partner.” As part of the deal, it launched the co-branded Strike Out Cancer initiative and agreed to donate $20 per K to cancer research². Fireballing aces like the Milwaukee Brewers’ Jacob Misiorowski and the New York Yankees’s Cam Schlittler helped leave AbbVie on the hook for $800,000 and counting.

Don’t cry for the Botox maker’s wallet yet. AbbVie, Inc. is valued at over half a trillion dollars. This is the type of money that can, with relative ease, purchase naming rights for nationally televised playoff games, aka the Major League Baseball Wild Card Series presented by AbbVie, plus activations during the 2026 MLB All Star Game. The company even sent a former college baseball player and cancer survivor named Nick to the Iowa cornfield MLB uses for its popular Field of Dreams game. “It says a lot about AbbVie as a company,” Nick said, praising his sponsor’s “support for their patients” and thanking the corporation for “giving people like me this experience.”

Not every AbbVie patient was living out their dream. In 2022, AbbVie announced one of its subsidiaries settled thousands of opioid-related claims accusing its subsidiary, Allergan, of illegal and deceptive marketing that downplayed opioid risks. According to the company, its nationwide settlement totaled up to $2.02 billion, though insisted the payout was not an admission of wrongdoing. (AbbVie did not respond to eyeblack’s request for comment on the MLB partnership.) Even still, it makes sense that a drug manufacturer would chase a little goodwill. ³

But, there’s one player who never got his chance to Strike Out Cancer before a deadly addiction to opioids ended his life.

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On June 30, 2019, Tyler Skaggs was on pace for a career high in strikeouts and was a respected leader on the Los Angeles Angels. Mike Trout, likely the greatest player in team history, testified that he loved him “like a brother.” But the next day, Skaggs was found dead in his hotel room from a fatal fentanyl overdose. Instead of the 27-year-old maturing his game enough to build a lengthy career—and maybe, one day, chip in a few K’s of his own to AbbVie’s campaign—Skaggs became one of 70,000 Americans that the Centers for Disease Control reported died that year from a drug overdose, over half of them from fentanyl. As one of a handful of MLB players to die of an overdose, Skaggs, became a highly visible face of an ongoing public health crisis that has provoked new treatment programs from the league, and an anti-drug partnership with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

And in 2019, MLB launched an independent investigation of Skaggs’ death, but the league has not yet publicly released the results of its findings.

The man Skaggs asked to slide him painkillers was convicted of distribution of a controlled substance that resulted in the pitcher’s death. And for his crime, Eric Kay is currently serving a 22-year federal prison term. But before that, Kay was a recently promoted communications director for the Angels who had survived an overdose of his own earlier that year. Like Skaggs, Kay had struggled with addiction for years, a condition that began during an era where drugmakers repeatedly downplayed the addictive risks of their products, and encouraged doctors to prescribe painkillers to patients, even when the patients showed signs of dependency.

Speaking of: Dr. Craig Milhouse, the Angels’ team physician, testified that he gave Kay over 600 pills of Vicodin and Norco between 2009 and 2013, allegedly ignorant that his prescriptions were exacerbating Kay’s addiction. The two pills he prescribed share much in common. Vicodin and Norco contain hydrocodone, the same active ingredient in the pills Skaggs sought before he died. And both Vicodin and Norco were manufactured by AbbVie, MLB’s preferred drug dealer.

Seven years after a drug overdose took the life of a player and sent a club official to prison, why would MLB strike a partnership with a Big Pharma brand? And not only just any Big Pharma brand, but one that made billions off the class of drugs that hooked them both?