Gagne is Gone!

Game Over for Eric Gagne's season

Eric Gagne is, or I should say was the closer for the Dodgers. He started the season on the disabled list and didn't come back from the list until Game 35. Just now, after game 70, the Dodgers announced that Gagne will have "Tommy John surgery," which will end his season.

Tommy John surgery is unique in that it's named after the patient, not the doctor. Tommy John was another Dodger pitcher in the '70s who sufferend a blown-out ligament in their elbow. He was lucky recipient of the first proceedure and did come back as a major league pitcher. It was something of a miracle then, and I vaguely remember his comeback. Now, however, the proceedure takes about an hour (TJ's took three), and in most cases, pitchers come back with similar or higher pitch speeds.

But Gagne, in that 35-game period between stints on the disabled list, came into the game 14 times and from that scored a win and eight saves. I was there at Dodger Stadium and saw him this year. He didn't get a save that afternoon since the Dodgers were four runs ahead at the top of the ninth. If they were just one or two runs ahead, it would have been a save. It felt like a save. The eery music played, I recall, like a downtuned church organ before his name was called. It was like some sort of wrestling event. Then his name was announced, and the P.A. played Guns and Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" (see sidebar, below).

The Dodgers organization strategically deploys the song to whip the crowd into a frenzy. Older Dodger fans probably only know the song now as the Eric Gagne song. There's something very cany about it. It comes on like blood in the water in a tank full of sharks. Everyone gets to their feet. The big TV screens, which are just everywhere within view nowadays, play animations of the words "Game Over." The background has the same words making up a print pattern. They slide the animated "Game Over" foreground and background in opposite directions, producing a sort of mass vertigo--especially when already standing up and woohooing and backed up by GNR. They've also put a cartoon logo of just his face hypnotically zooming through the video. It reminds me of Bob from the Church of the SubGenius.

It was a fucking trip.

"Welcome to the Jungle" Sidebar

I never liked GNR one bit. From the first time I heard that song, I thought these guys were frauds. A lot of people with whom I went to high school or worked at a movie theater with loved GNR; they thought I was just dumb and stubborn. I feel like I was finally vindicated by "November Rain."

Because it's hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain.

But I have a new appreciation for "Welcome to the Jungle" now that I've heard it in a stadium. I now understand the importance of "stadium" in the term "stadium rock." I spent my teen years as a devout U2 fan, which is just stadium rock of a different vibe, so I guess I had a grasp of what stadium rock was about all along. But it was the first time that I enjoyed the menacing sound of that song--it was because I was in a mob of people wearing hats the same color as mine.

It just goes to show you that once you have a bunch of people wearing uniforms, listening to pounding drums, while collected in a stadium, you can sway their opinions. But I guess the Nazis figured that out 70 years before I did.