Red Sox: Please Give Up on Gagne!

I don't blame Eric Gagne for being a total bust since he was traded at the deadline to the Boston Red Sox. But since he has proven to be that bust - don't ever use him again! Putting him in games now is just setting him up to fail... unless it's a game in which the BoSox have a 10 run lead and only an inning to go.

Is Gagne's failure really his fault, though?

Gagne was a closer - he worked one inning - the ninth, for much of his career. It takes a different mindset to be a closer than it does to be a middle relief or set up man. And Gagne was brought in and told to be a set up man rather than a closer, and for whatever reason, he has been unable to make the adjustment, mentally, that he had to make, in the last month or so.

And asking him to do it in the playoffs what he failed to do in the last month or so is just not an option.

To be sure, Gagne was Francona's last choice in that last game, after having used up Okajima and Papelbon, and if Gagne let two men get on, it was the other relief pitcher, Lopez, who threw a wild pitch to let the first run score, and the flood gates opened from there.

Gagne is a man without confidence now. The whole team is behind him, vocally, to the media, but you and I both know that Gagne knows that they're just saying that, and that inwardly each and everyone of them is seething - although as baseball players they too know that it's hard to ask a player to play a different position that he's not used to. Even if pitching seems like one position, it really isn't - not these days - and Gagne has been ruined for the post season, I think.

So if he's ever brought in again, and louses up again, I won't blame him - I'll blame the management that put him out there.