My personal opinion of the Gagne situation

I'm actually glad that Gagne is back in the closer position. I hear a lot of non-sense about the "committee" being 2-0 and gagne having 5 blown saves on the year. I know Gagne isn't pitching as well as we'd like our closer to do, but he's also appeared in half of our games this year already (That's 19 games out of 39 for the non-math endowed people). Since the NL has expanded to 16 teams, the average number of saves for a team has been pretty steadily around 40. The league average for save percentage for the last few years was around 67%, that's 2/3. So I can safely assume an average team will see around 60 save attempts per year. The Brewers are less than one fourth of the way into the season and yet Gagne has appeared 19 times already. That's a lot of work for a closer, especially when you consider that not all of those 60 potential save attempts are going to the same guy. The Brewers blew 20 saves in total last year, we are one quarter of the way through the year and Gagne has blown 5, the team total this year is 7. That seems to be slight ahead of the average, but the league average last year was 20 blown saves. As I've mentioned before we are ahead of the league average on save opportunities for the year as well. Only two teams had less than 14 blown save opportunities last year. Does that make it ok that Gagne has blown these saves? No. However I do think it helps to put things into perspective. Give the averages time to even themselves out and get Gagne a normal work flow. Popping into games 5 nights in a row is going to put a strain on any closer, not just our popular quebecois scapegoat.

Take this into account as well, for every team in the major leagues, only two have a reliever that has been their closer since earlier than 2004, the Yankees with Rivera and the Padres with Hoffman (the latter of which is probably soon to end). The closer position is so damn volatile and so closely scrutinized that sometimes fans forget to take a step back and realize, that's just the way the game is sometimes, no closer is going to be perfect. Granted Gagne is quite far from perfect, but I think before people continue to jump down his throat they should consider this, I don't think there's a better answer than him to be the closer in our bullpen right now. There's a lot of pressure when you are put into that situation and it's not really a spot where you want to be doing trial and error testing on pitchers that are unproven in the closer role.

Also just a little food for thought in contradiction to what I said here, the only team this year without a blown save? The Reds. Of course they've only had 7 save opportunities, so once again take that number with a grain of salt.