It’s been a tough week for some of the glamor names in the relief pitching business. Aaron Heilman, just two seasons removed from being one of the game’s premier set-up men, was booed lustily at Shea yesterday during an inauspicious mop-up assignment. Joba Chamberlain bounced back from blowing a save against the Indians and found himself critiqued by that conscience of all-things-Yankee, Goose Gossage. Jason Isringhausen pulled himself from the Cards’ closer role. Boston’s Jonathan Papelbon blew a pair of saves in a row (the second with an assist from Julio Lugo). But there’s probably no prominent reliever in the game with as big a black cloud hovering overhead than Milwaukee’s Eric Gagne.
A trio of Brewer relievers combined (just barely) to protect a lead for Jeff Suppan earlier today, but Gagne wasn’t summoned. “He still wears his uniform casually enough to suggest amiable slovenliness; he still has the grizzly visage of his suddenly-seem-brief peak seasons; he still has the rumbling delivery and sweat-salted cap,” writes The MLB Source’s Jeff Kallman, however “that™s about the only thing that today™s Gagne shares with the Cy Young Award winner who once brought Dodger Stadium to its feet and to somewhere beyond the top of its voices.”
Gagne has been eroded in portions between a series of debilitating shoulder and elbow injuries, including a second Tommy John surgery and a followup to first liberate and then remove a suffocated nerve, and a Mitchell Report revelation that he had at least acquired human growth hormone. (Was he, too, looking for injury relief?) He™s been chipped from a plateau from which he could see the top of Isringhausen™s and almost everyone else™s scalps.
No closer in baseball who wasn™t named Gagne could cause every last Yankee in the opposing dugout, including The Mariano himself, to study his every look, his every grip, his every movement, his every element of turn, kick, delivery, follow-through, and intent.
That™s precisely what Gagne did one night in Dodger Stadium, in an assignment that began with inducing Alex Rodriguez to kill an eighth-inning rally and climaxed when he punched out Bernie Williams, in the roaring at-bat that began with Vin Scully himself prompted to turn off his mike, after uttering the sentence noted three paragraphs earlier, and just let the viewers sink into the depth of the din, right up to the moment he strangled Williams for strike three.
Gagne™s most jarring 2008 statistic: He has a 21.60 ERA to show for his blown saves and losses, but in eleven other gigs the other guys couldn™t pry runs out of him even at gunpoint.
Gagne™s probably accepted that the days he brought a city to a dead halt are gone forever. He™s probably hoping that the days won™t be dying in which he can throw a baseball with success of any kind at all. Isringhausen in his own right has only the second of those to worry about.
“in eleven other gigs the other guys couldn’t pry runs out of him even at gunpoint.”
Apparently Kallman didn’t pay much attention to the latter half of the 2007 Red Sox season.
from the one paragraph I DIDN’T cut and paste :
“following a 2007 in which he seemed to revive in Texas only to slip between the periodically powerful and the occasionally lame as Jonathan Papelbon’s setup in Boston—that flashing scoreboard display of old, showing image after onrushing image of Gagne’s goggled visage between blasts of GAME OVER, may telegraph something Gagne may not be anxious to face.”
26 hits and 14 runs in 18 + IP seems more like “regularly lame”, but credit where due, Kallman did acknowledge Gagne pitched for someone other than the Rangers last season.
by “eleven other gigs”, I believe Kallman is referring the 11 occasions this season in which Gagne didn’t allow an inherited runner to score nor was he charged with a run. And it’s a fair point. He’s not routinely awful, just an alarmingly high percentage of the time.
Presumably, there were nights when David Berkowitz didn’t kill anyone, either.
Kallman was indeed referring to the eleven occasions this season in which Gagne didn’t allow an inherited runner to score or surrender a run in his own right. A point that might have been a little more clear had the, er, setup clause (“Gagne’s most jarring 2008 statistic . . . “) been observed at the outset of the paragraph in question.
Kallman also knows for whom Gagne pitched in 2007, being that he has been a Boston Red Sox fan since the 1967 pennant race, to say nothing of a New York Mets fan since the day they were born. Which is probably why you wouldn’t want to know Kallman’s bill for Class A drugs in October 1986.
On the other hand, if you’re seeking big black clouds over formidable pen men, keep a close enough eye upon Trevor Time, too, whom enough in San Diego seemingly want to send to the glue factory after all those years of horsemanship and all these weeks of apparent struggle.
Yours cordially . . .
point taken about Hoffman, though it was this week in particular I was considering. He’s only been used once since April 30 and survived the 9th inning of Maddux’s 350th career win without incident.
A gig is a job where I come from – not a task performed at a job – but you learn something new every day.
I will say this about Gagne, I wouldn’t have attended the best game of my life (2007 ALCS Game 7) if he hadn’t lost Game 2, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I can’t remember the last time that a closer asked to be taken out of that role. I think he’s in danger of having to spend more time with his family if he doesn’t learn another pitch.
Eric—In musical terms (I’m also a guitar player) a gig is a particular appearance. But it’s always intriguing how one man’s disaster might set up another man’s euphoria, and Game Seven was one of the great games of my postseason lifetime.
GC—To hear Hoffman and Maddux both say it, that win and that ninth inning got damped when the Padres lost two teammates of whom most were very fond no matter how bad they were doing. Baseball’s realities aren’t always pretty. Me, I’m still wondering what on earth Bud Black wasn’t thinking when he warmed up Hoffman three times before finally bringing him in in the win-or-be-gone game last September, hardly thinking that he might have gassed his closer before said closer had stepped out of the bullpen.
—Jeff