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Eric Gagne ‘Regrets’ Something or Other, It Seems

Feb 20, 2010, 11:00 PM UTC

Eric Gagne won the 2003 NL Cy Young with the Dodgers, and is back with Los Angeles this year, having signed a minor-league deal. That return brought attention, and that attention brought questions about performance-enhancing drugs, and those questions, today, brought a vague quasi-admission of guilt.â†µâ†µWrites Jeff Chandler of FanHouse:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥On the day Gagne arrived at Dodgers camp to begin what he hopes is a return to the majors, he responded to questions about his past connections to performance-enhancing drugs by saying “There are a lot of regrets.” (Jason) Giambi famously apologized without ever saying what he was apologizing for.â‡¥â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥Gagne, the 2003 Cy Young winner with the Dodgers, was included in the Mitchell Report in 2007. Since then he’s had failed stints with the Red Sox, Rangers and Brewers.â‡¥â†µâ‡¥
â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥“I’ve said it 150 times, it’s always going to be on my resume for the rest of my life,” Gagne told reporters. “People will second-guess everything I do and if I have a good year they’ll all second guess. That’s normal. I’m not expecting anything else. But for me it’s over. I have to go on. I can talk about it every day. It doesn’t matter. I still have to go out and pitch and perform.”â‡¥â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µGagne being named in the Mitchell Report was probably enough evidence for most to conclude that he used something at some point, so I have a hard time coming up with anyone outside the media who could have been clamoring for any sort of comment from him on anything.â†µ

â†µâ†µI guess the statute of limitations for righteous anger about steroid use isn’t up yet.â†µ

â†µ

For the Los Angeles media, though, this is a pathetically easy story or column to peck out: dial up the outrage and shock, and direct it at millionaires, and people typically respond. (See Woods, Eldrick Tont.) And so this question gets asked at spring training, despite Gagne telling a Los Angeles Times reporter “I just can’t talk about it” last year. With his new answer, for the uninspired columnist, a little bit of manna falls from heaven. â†µâ†µFor Gagne, likewise, answering the question serves a purpose. It is probably cathartic, even if the acknowledgment is as generic as possible, to confess, uh, whatever it is that he is confessing. But it’s the last quote from Gagne in Fletcher’s story, the one about spending last year with the Quebec Capitales, that resonates with me:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥“I just basically played for fun,” Gagne said. “I haven’t done that in a long time. It was a good experience.”â†µâ†µâ†µGagne made millions of dollars playing baseball, was perhaps the game’s most dominant pitcher for a year, and won a World Series with the Red Sox in 2007. At what point did that stop being fun?â†µ

â†µâ†µThat’s the question I want answered.â†µ

â†µ

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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