MVN - Most Valuable Network

“I Don’t Deserve That Ninth Inning Right Now”

And now it’s Eric Gagne asking for a change of job description, in some ways a little more bluntly than Jason Isringhausen sought and got a kind of mental break after his latest lapse a night earlier.

This is a series that has got to make both the Milwaukee Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals think. They open the weekend with alternating wins each of which convinces the other club’s closer—this may be unprecedented—that maybe he needs a change of station. Even if each closer’s bosses weren’t exactly ready to change those stations no matter what the overall numbers and the latest tumblers might have suggested.

One night, Isringhausen joined Gagne as the National League’s blown saves leader against the Brewers and reproached himself for pitching like a second grader. The following night, Gagne surrendered a two-run single in a tie game, took the loss to the Cardinals, and practically tore the dunce cap off Isringhausen’s head when he joined up in the corner.

“I don’t deserve that ninth inning right now,” Gagne said, with no self pity. “It’s pretty simple.” That’s a jarring self evaluation from a man who once owned the ninth inning the way no one not named The Mariano owned it.

Now he had the dubious honour of taking his catcher off the proverbial hook for Saturday’s 5-3 loss. The Brewers might have taken an eighth-inning lead with Bill Hall on third and the squeeze on, but Jason Kendall missed the sign, didn’t wave a bunt on a first pitch strike, and Hall was a dead pigeon flying down the third base line.

Isringhausen may be the fortunate in one regard. He has been one of the game’s elite closers, but he never carried the burden of Gagne’s rumbling charisma and doesn’t necessarily have to worry about a salve for his ego after tumbling from a plateau lofty enough.

He’s nailed down some of the Cardinals’ (and, before that, the Oakland Athletics’) most important wins over the past seven years, but Isringhausen never brought his home parks to the kind of thundering standstills that provoke his clubs’ lead broadcasters to even think of telling the home listeners, “You really ought to hear it for yourselves, so I’m just going to keep my mouth shut.”

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.

That Eric Gagne could never imagine his name becoming attached to a 6.89 earned run average, a 1.84 walks/hits-per-inning-pitched rate, and a .400 batting average against him.

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. 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.

But now—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.

“He’s really pushing himself really, really hard and taking it really, really hard,” Brewers manager Ned Yost told reporters after Gagne made his decision. “We’ll probably just mix and match, I’m not going to do anything crazy.”

No, but he’s going to set up a committee that includes anyone in the pen, from reviving setup specialist Guillermo Mota (once the front half of the Dodgers’ fearsome late-game marksmanship, setting up Gagne) and veterans David Riske (21 saves lifetime) and Salomon Torres (30 saves lifetime), as well as Gagne himself when the moment strikes properly enough.

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.

“He just, right now, has been beat down a little bit and needs to take a step back and regain his confidence and make an adjustment or two,” Yost told reporters, after declining to elaborate upon his comment that Brewers coaches think they know what’s really wrong. “He’ll pitch in the seventh and the eighth and if we mix and match, he’ll pitch some in the ninth, too, just like everybody will.”

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 7:25 am and is filed under Catbird, Eric Gagne, Milwaukee Brewers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.