Gagne starts over after glory years

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/05/2009 (6063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hal LANIER, meet Eric Gagne.

The 1986 National League manager of the year and former longtime skipper of the Winnipeg Goldeyes could be managing against the former Cy Young award winner as early as next Thursday, when Lanier’s Sussex Skyhawks take on Gagne’s Quebec Capitales in New Jersey.

Gagne, a Montreal native, stunned the baseball world this week when he announced he had signed to play with the Capitales of the independent Can-Am League, a struggling six-team loop on the East Coast.

Gagne told reporters Wednesday that he was hoping to use a stint as a starting pitcher with the Capitales this summer to relaunch a derailed major league career that has seen him take a meteoric plummet from winning the Cy Young to being labelled a drug cheat, undergoing Tommy John surgery and finding himself out of organized ball entirely in the span of just six years.

Which, coincidentally enough, is not unlike Lanier’s story. Lanier was anointed one of the two finest managers in all of baseball in 1986 as skipper of the Houston Astros, only to find himself run out of the game just five years later.

Lanier ended up toiling for Winnipeg for the better part of a decade, trying to get back into organized ball, before parting ways with the Goldeyes a few years ago and eventually finding his way to Sussex.

Lanier never did get back to the majors and Gagne will be fighting the odds too. Gagne won the 2003 NL Cy Young award with a stratospheric 55 saves, but then began the skid that has landed him in Quebec.

Gagne was named in the Mitchell report on illegal drug use in Major League Baseball as one of the players who received steroids from a New York Mets clubhouse attendant. Gagne did not co-operate with Mitchell in the investigation.

And his arm has never been the same since Tommy John surgery in 2005. He saved just 10 games for the Milwaukee Brewers last season and blew seven more opportunities. The Brewers gave him his outright release this spring after he felt soreness in his throwing arm during spring training.

Capitales officials said Gagne preferred playing independent ball near his hometown to trying to work his way back to the majors through the affiliated system.

"He wants to come to Quebec instead of starting at the bottom in the farm clubs," Michel Laplante, the club director, told reporters this week.

Capitales owner Miles Wolff, best known to Goldeyes fans as the longtime former commissioner of the Northern League, was delighted to have such a big name on his roster.

"It’s too early to gauge the impact of his arrival on turnout at the stadium," Wolff told a Quebec newspaper, "but let’s just say it’s a big score for the team [and] for the league as well."

Gagne told reporters this week that he’s going to take his time coming back.

"I’m not putting pressure on myself to come back in two weeks or one month or whatever," he told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. "Hopefully, I can come back to the major leagues sooner rather than later… Right now, I’m not looking at that; I’m looking to get healthy."

Gagne’s Capitales play Lanier’s Skyhawks twice in the next few weeks — in a three-game series in Sussex next week and then a week later in Quebec, where the Capitales play in Le Stade de Quebec, a 4,800-seat park built in 1939 that will be a far cry from the confines of Dodgers Stadium, where Gagne did his best work.

The Capitales played in the Can-Am League back in the 1940s, but the league disbanded for more than 60 years until it was resurrected in 2005. It had as many as 10 teams as recently as 2006 but is now limping along, like the Northern League, with just six teams.

According to the league website, Gagne would be the first to graduate to the majors from the Can-Am League if he’s able to pull it off.

And so if Gagne is looking for a kindred spirit, he need look no farther than the other dugout next week when his club takes on Lanier’s club.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca