In Defense of Gagne (Sort Of)

There has been a lot of flak given to Gagne for his rocky start this season, and how he is the biggest problem area on the team, and just an all-around disaster.  I think a lot of this criticism is misplaced, especially if you take a step back and look at the actual impact of Gagne to our success.  I'm not saying he hasn't cost us some games, but he is by no means the only (or even the chief) reason for our less-than-desired start.  As a comparison here is a list of the six NL Central closers with the percentage of appearances in which they've given up runs (admittedly a rather rough statistic, but probably a better indicator of success than ERA or Saves):

• Player A: 33% runs/appearances
• Player B: 33% runs/appearances
  
• Player C: 31% runs/appearances
• Placer D: 29% runs/appearances
• Player E: 25% runs/appearances
• Player F: 8% runs/appearances

That's a pretty ugly list; four out of five NL Central closers are giving up runs once every four games.  Not all of these are blown saves, but if your closer is giving up any runs at all, it's a bad sign.  The interesting part is that Gagne is not at the top of this list.  The top two spots are held by Jason Isringhausen, who is the closer for the first place team in the NL Central; and Jose Valverde, who is the closer for the team that just swept us.  (The order is: Isringhausen, Valverde, Gagne, Wood, Cordero, Capps).  Furthermore, Kerry Wood is only slightly less sporadic than Gagne to start the season, yet the Cubs are also ahead of us in the standings. 

Clearly Gagne shouldn't be given the lion's share of the blame for our .500 performance.  Our offense was the main weapon coming into the season, and so far it's been largely stagnant.  We're not in third place because of Gagne, both St. Louis and Chicago have comparably bad closers (and the best closer in the NL Central so far, Matt Capps, pitches for the lowly Pirates).  Even using more traditional stats, Gagne has a lower ERA than Isringhausen and a better K/BB than Cordero, who are comparably expensive but locked into multi-year deals.

The signing can be criticized in hindsight, but there really weren't that many options.  Even players we were all thrilled to have, like David Riske, have performed equally as bad as Gagne.  I know Gagne is off to a rough start, but he's still preferable to locking in Cordero for 4 years, and he's not the reason for our struggles.