(no subject)
A post full of cut tags and other points.
1. I am procrastinating on watching the season two finale of Supernatural because I'm afraid it'll depress the shit out of me.
2.
In the HP-verse, are ghosts confined to a location? Is the Headless Hunt sort of proof that ghosts can travel? I know in traditional ghost lore (or rather, in traditional ghost lore as SPN has taught it to me) ghosts are confined to one place, being all unsettled, but is this true in HP?
3. Alex and I were discussing Eric Gagne and she expressed interest in the 2004 ESPN Magazine article about him. It's a really great article which makes me want to squish him, so I scanned it as text and posted it. I'm leaving this post unlocked (shock! awe!) in case people want to link it or whatever.
Over and Over by Tom Friend (ESPN Magazine, 8/2/04)
Eric Gagne doesn't just save game after game. He's transformed a team and its fans
The face of the Los Angeles Dodgers wears a Brillo pad on his chin, prescription goggles and a hat full of bacteria. He cusses in French, perfects his English watching Seinfeld ,and eats Japanese food almost every night. He has a headbanger theme song, pants that need to be let out at the thighs and a bobblehead of himself giving the finger above his locker. Other than that, he's harmless.
A once-pristine franchise is now playing with its jerseys untucked, and it's all because of a 28-year-old relief pitcher who answers to B.D.A. (Big Dumb Animal) and who, for 678 days, never blew a lead. blew a lead. Eighty-four times the Dodgers took at least a one-run edge into the last or next-to¬ last inning, and 84 times catcher Paul Lo Duca turned to his teammates in the dugout and said, “Bring on The Goon." Eighty-four times an unkempt man took a swig of Mountain Dew or coffee in the bullpen, and 84 times he walked in and annihilated hitters with a secret pitch: the Bugs Bunny changeup.
Eighty-four times, and the tying run reached third base only once. Eighty-four times, and his ERA had to be read with a microscope: 0.82. Eighty-four times, and a notoriously soft team learned it could be hard to the core.
Sometime during this DiMaggio of save streaks, the Dodgers were remade in their closer's image. Maybe it was when Lo Duca grew some Brillo of his own. Maybe it was when they started playing Eminem in the clubhouse. Or maybe it was when centerfielder Dave Roberts robbed Houston's Lance Berkman of an eighth-inning home run, preserving the streak at 52 games, and heard the following compliment from Eric Gagne: "Good job, f-er."
OF COURSE, before he could save the Dodgers, Eric Gagne had to save himself.
Take a look at his rookie card from the 2000 sea¬son and you will not see a goatee, and you will not see a barrel chest. Instead, you will see a boy starving himself to death.
Take another look, and you will not see a four-leaf clover tattooed on his right triceps or a scar on his right eyebrow. You will see only skin and bones.
Eric Gagne was not the face of the Dodgers back then; he was an erratic French-Canadian righthander with an eating disorder. His diet was milk and cookies and little else, and his weight fell treacherously from 220 pounds to 180. It's the most important jam he's ever worked out of.
He eventually sat with a Dodger psychologist in a minor league dugout to sort through his story, a story that begins with a family breakup and ends happily, with Cooperstown requesting the ball from his record 84th consecutive save. It was never Gagne's intention to electrify Dodger Stadium or jump-start the clubhouse or have 60-year-old ushers humming Guns N' Roses. He just wanted his parents to get back together.
But all he could control was the baseball. And so, nine years into his pro career, the emaciated kid has turned into this: a 6'2", 240-pound whopper.
Ask him how it's gotten so good, and Eric Gagne will tell you it's because it used to be so bad. He was 17 when his parents divorced, and it floored him. His father, Richard, drove a Montreal city bus, and his mother, Carole, waitressed in a Greek cafe, and, because they worked all hours of the day and night, he never knew their marriage was in tatters.
When he found out, he closed off, became a tough guy. Wore an earring in his eyebrow. Got the tattoo. Food? Who needed it. Eyeglasses? Who needed 'em. Sore arm? Pitched through it.
His minor league career was littered with denial. At Class-A Savannah in 1996, he tried to pitch through a dull ache in his elbow for six months until the Dodgers finally sent him to Dr. Frank Jobe for Tommy John surgery. He spent the entire 1997 season thinking about quitting, thinking about playing college hockey at the U. of Vermont or pursuing a psychology degree at McGill, never thinking about food. "I guess I was sad or whatever," he says. "I wouldn't eat."
When he returned to the Dodgers' minor league camp in 1998, he could only heat his fastball up to 88 mph. So he invented a pitch. A changeup. A changeup that ideally would look like a fastball for 55 feet and then fall off a cliff. A changeup that didn't change much for four months at Class-A Vero Beach. Then, in his last seven starts, it finally clicked: he went 5-1 with a 1.63 ERA.
The following spring, the Dodgers promoted him to Double-A San Antonio. Except now there was a new problem: he couldn't see. “At night I couldn't make out the catcher's signs," Gagne says. "He'd ask for a curveball, and I'd throw a fastball off his chest. I said, all right, that's enough. I think I need to see an eye doctor."
Actually, it was Valerie Hervieux, his girlfriend at the time, who convinced him to see an ophthalmologist. "Oh my god, it was bad," says Valerie, who's now his wife. "He'd be driving, and he'd say, 'Tell me where to exit.’ I'd say, 'Why?' He'd say, 'I cannot see.’ I'd say, 'You need glasses!'"
He wanted contacts, but an old hockey injury, a high-stick to the left eye socket, had left him with scar tissue that kept a contact lens from centering properly. So he got glasses and wore them to the mound. But the lenses kept fogging up, and because of his astigmatism, they also made home plate appear closer than it was. In his first game with the new specs, he didn't throw a strike until his 18th pitch.
When he finally found a reliable pair of goggles, he started winning, but he still wasn't eating, not enough, anyway. He talked again to the Dodger psychologist and finally accepted that his parents' divorce wasn't his fault. But the breakthrough was living in his in-laws' basement in the winter after the 1999 season and seeing how a relationship is supposed to work. "My parents are kissing all the time,'" Valerie says. “And then my grandma arrives and she kisses everybody.'" He and Valerie even found a food he would actually indulge in: sushi. Every day it was broiled crab rolls, a dozen at a time, to the point that he was almost roly-poly.
When he hit the bigs for good in 2001, no one knew the real story. All they saw was his circus pitch, the changeup that Brian Jordan would name after the one in the cartoon in which Bugs gets the Gashouse Gorillas to swing and miss three times on the same slowball. All they saw was his grisly goatee and his Kareem goggles. All they saw was his biohazard of a cap. "He was just a mess," Lo Duca says.
But that was the charm of Eric Gagne. He never wanted his colleagues to see him in his reading glasses, so he'd sit in the clubhouse squinting at his surroundings. His eyesight was deteriorating--he's needed three new prescriptions in the past two years--but he's still been known to bat in games without his goggles. He'd made himself into a tough guy, and he couldn't take it back.
At some point, his persona had gotten out of his control. Maybe because he'd taken his hockey player's intensity to the bullpen and reached 100 saves faster than any closer in history. Maybe because the Dodgers started flashing GAME OVER on the scoreboard and blaring "Welcome to the Jungle'" the moment he'd take the field. Maybe because he'd wanted to shave his chin this spring and his teammates wouldn't let him. Maybe because the famously jaded Dodger fans actually started staying all nine innings, for the first time in ages, just to see, him pump his ample fist. Maybe because hundreds of them took part in an Eric Gagne look-alike contest. ("Scary how much the winner looked like me,'" Gagne says.) Maybe because he'd crank Eminem in the clubhouse. And maybe because he'd given the Dodgers their swagger back.
He'd become the B.D.A., like it or not.
AND IT'S all such a lie.
Eric Gagne is leaving the stadium after his 82nd straight save, carrying a large, paper grocery bag. Is it food?
"No," he says. "Fan mail.”
He answers all of it, or does the best he can, and sometimes he1l even visit the fans in person. He's made a habit of visiting the Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA. And as T.J. Simers of the Los Angeles Times can attest, Gagne won't let reporters enter the rooms with him unless the kids are okay with it. A 9-year-old named Mario Castillo wasn't okay with it, so Gagne pulled him behind a curtain and offered to show him the secret. The secret of the Bugs Bunny changeup. "But you can't tell anybody," Gagne told him. "You have to promise."
When Gagne left, the boy was smiling, and Simers moseyed over to Mario. "You can tell me about the changeup," he said.
No way, Mario said.
"It's no big deal, Mario. I'm supposed to know these things."
Forget it, Mario said. And then he held up an autographed poster of an angry-looking Gagne pitching in the ninth. "Look how mean he gets," Mario said. "I promised."
Gagne, hearing about this later, sent up a jersey to Mario. And he signed it, "To the boy who can keep a secret."
The Dodgers’ front office hears these kind of stories, and they brag. Yes, the new owner, Frank McCourt, has changed the atmosphere in Dodger Stadium. Yes, the team's on its way to 3.4 million in attendance. But none of it would matter if the Dodgers didn't have a chance to make the playoffs for the first time since 1996, or if Lo Duca and Adrian Beltre weren't candidates for Comeback Player of the Year, or if Gagne weren't so automatic.
The Dodgers so depend on Gagne that, a year and a half ago, Lo Duca and the other clubhouse leaders asked him to stop taking BP, for fear he'd pull a muscle. "I know one guy can't win the pen¬nant," pitcher Jose Lima says, "but Gagne's close." He was late to the clubhouse a few weeks ago, thanks to LA gridlock, and the players were somewhat concerned. When he finally arrived, only 90 minutes before the first pitch, there was only one way to express-their relief: they blared "Welcome to the Jungle" as he walked through the door. "I guess I'm gonna hear that song every time I make an entrance," says Gagne.
"Without him, we're in trouble," says Roberts. "In the past, you'd hear that the Dodgers have that Hollywood image, and I think some people might construe it as being soft. But when you've got a guy like Eric Gagne, that toughness and attitude carries over."
If they knew his real story, though, his teammates would realize the B.D.A. is just a B.D.T.B. (Big Dumb Teddy Bear). They have no idea that the scar above his right eye isn’t from hockey (Valerie got her hair caught on his pierced eyebrow a few years back, and Gagne had to rip the piercing out.) That he's scared to get Lasik surgery to correct his vision. That he has 50 pairs of glasses at home, some of them horn-rimmed. That he just wrote a children's book called Break Barriers, touching on his eating disorder and his parents' divorce. That he doesn't speak in team meetings because he's hopelessly shy. That he keeps the 55 baseballs from last year's portion of his save streak in a brown paper sack. Or that the first time his mom saw him earn a save at Dodger Stadium, she began to weep. "She and the rest of my family are overwhelmed," Gagne says. "See, to them, I'm still the same little guy from Mascouche."
In Los Angeles, his face is up on billboards. He and his wife laugh at what's become of his image, and in particular, they laugh about the sweat¬stained cap that's such a big part of it.
"It's disgusting," says Valerie, who's also French¬-Canadian. "Don't put it on my head. Sometimes I am watching him on TV and I'm saying people will think he's a dirty person, that he never cleans, never showers. Every time I meet a new person, they ask me about the hat. I just tell them he says it doesn't smell.
“And sometimes people ask me, 'Is he nice with you?' What? I would not be with him if he was not nice. But people just get the feeling he's kind of aggressive. Maybe it's the goatee."
But the Brillo doesn't get people out. Gagne saves games because he works out for 90 minutes in the clubhouse every day. Because his fastball hits 98 mph, and that Bugs Bunny changeup reg¬isters 86. ("That's only a 12 mph difference, but to hitters it seems more like 60," says Lima.) Because he also has a 68 mph slurve that he's not afraid to throw 10 straight times if he knows a hitter can't touch it. Because whenever he hears "Welcome to the Jungle," he breaks into a cold sweat. "Gets him in the mood," Valerie says. For 678 days, it worked like a charm.
And then, on the night he blew his first save in almost two years, his teammates saved him, and beat the Diamondbacks in 10 innings. "We owed him one--or 80," says Roberts.
When he did his interviews that night, he did them with his chest puffed out, knowing he couldn't let anybody see him droop, especially not the impressionable fellows in his clubhouse. He kept his eyeglasses in his pocket, and he told the media he'd start another streak soon, maybe one that lasted--gulp--longer.
And then he was out the door, glasses on. The sushi was waiting.
4. New icon. Feel free to doubt me on this, but I SWEAR this is Matthew Lewis at the OotP premiere. No further comment.
1. I am procrastinating on watching the season two finale of Supernatural because I'm afraid it'll depress the shit out of me.
2.
In the HP-verse, are ghosts confined to a location? Is the Headless Hunt sort of proof that ghosts can travel? I know in traditional ghost lore (or rather, in traditional ghost lore as SPN has taught it to me) ghosts are confined to one place, being all unsettled, but is this true in HP?
3. Alex and I were discussing Eric Gagne and she expressed interest in the 2004 ESPN Magazine article about him. It's a really great article which makes me want to squish him, so I scanned it as text and posted it. I'm leaving this post unlocked (shock! awe!) in case people want to link it or whatever.
Over and Over by Tom Friend (ESPN Magazine, 8/2/04)
Eric Gagne doesn't just save game after game. He's transformed a team and its fans
The face of the Los Angeles Dodgers wears a Brillo pad on his chin, prescription goggles and a hat full of bacteria. He cusses in French, perfects his English watching Seinfeld ,and eats Japanese food almost every night. He has a headbanger theme song, pants that need to be let out at the thighs and a bobblehead of himself giving the finger above his locker. Other than that, he's harmless.
A once-pristine franchise is now playing with its jerseys untucked, and it's all because of a 28-year-old relief pitcher who answers to B.D.A. (Big Dumb Animal) and who, for 678 days, never blew a lead. blew a lead. Eighty-four times the Dodgers took at least a one-run edge into the last or next-to¬ last inning, and 84 times catcher Paul Lo Duca turned to his teammates in the dugout and said, “Bring on The Goon." Eighty-four times an unkempt man took a swig of Mountain Dew or coffee in the bullpen, and 84 times he walked in and annihilated hitters with a secret pitch: the Bugs Bunny changeup.
Eighty-four times, and the tying run reached third base only once. Eighty-four times, and his ERA had to be read with a microscope: 0.82. Eighty-four times, and a notoriously soft team learned it could be hard to the core.
Sometime during this DiMaggio of save streaks, the Dodgers were remade in their closer's image. Maybe it was when Lo Duca grew some Brillo of his own. Maybe it was when they started playing Eminem in the clubhouse. Or maybe it was when centerfielder Dave Roberts robbed Houston's Lance Berkman of an eighth-inning home run, preserving the streak at 52 games, and heard the following compliment from Eric Gagne: "Good job, f-er."
OF COURSE, before he could save the Dodgers, Eric Gagne had to save himself.
Take a look at his rookie card from the 2000 sea¬son and you will not see a goatee, and you will not see a barrel chest. Instead, you will see a boy starving himself to death.
Take another look, and you will not see a four-leaf clover tattooed on his right triceps or a scar on his right eyebrow. You will see only skin and bones.
Eric Gagne was not the face of the Dodgers back then; he was an erratic French-Canadian righthander with an eating disorder. His diet was milk and cookies and little else, and his weight fell treacherously from 220 pounds to 180. It's the most important jam he's ever worked out of.
He eventually sat with a Dodger psychologist in a minor league dugout to sort through his story, a story that begins with a family breakup and ends happily, with Cooperstown requesting the ball from his record 84th consecutive save. It was never Gagne's intention to electrify Dodger Stadium or jump-start the clubhouse or have 60-year-old ushers humming Guns N' Roses. He just wanted his parents to get back together.
But all he could control was the baseball. And so, nine years into his pro career, the emaciated kid has turned into this: a 6'2", 240-pound whopper.
Ask him how it's gotten so good, and Eric Gagne will tell you it's because it used to be so bad. He was 17 when his parents divorced, and it floored him. His father, Richard, drove a Montreal city bus, and his mother, Carole, waitressed in a Greek cafe, and, because they worked all hours of the day and night, he never knew their marriage was in tatters.
When he found out, he closed off, became a tough guy. Wore an earring in his eyebrow. Got the tattoo. Food? Who needed it. Eyeglasses? Who needed 'em. Sore arm? Pitched through it.
His minor league career was littered with denial. At Class-A Savannah in 1996, he tried to pitch through a dull ache in his elbow for six months until the Dodgers finally sent him to Dr. Frank Jobe for Tommy John surgery. He spent the entire 1997 season thinking about quitting, thinking about playing college hockey at the U. of Vermont or pursuing a psychology degree at McGill, never thinking about food. "I guess I was sad or whatever," he says. "I wouldn't eat."
When he returned to the Dodgers' minor league camp in 1998, he could only heat his fastball up to 88 mph. So he invented a pitch. A changeup. A changeup that ideally would look like a fastball for 55 feet and then fall off a cliff. A changeup that didn't change much for four months at Class-A Vero Beach. Then, in his last seven starts, it finally clicked: he went 5-1 with a 1.63 ERA.
The following spring, the Dodgers promoted him to Double-A San Antonio. Except now there was a new problem: he couldn't see. “At night I couldn't make out the catcher's signs," Gagne says. "He'd ask for a curveball, and I'd throw a fastball off his chest. I said, all right, that's enough. I think I need to see an eye doctor."
Actually, it was Valerie Hervieux, his girlfriend at the time, who convinced him to see an ophthalmologist. "Oh my god, it was bad," says Valerie, who's now his wife. "He'd be driving, and he'd say, 'Tell me where to exit.’ I'd say, 'Why?' He'd say, 'I cannot see.’ I'd say, 'You need glasses!'"
He wanted contacts, but an old hockey injury, a high-stick to the left eye socket, had left him with scar tissue that kept a contact lens from centering properly. So he got glasses and wore them to the mound. But the lenses kept fogging up, and because of his astigmatism, they also made home plate appear closer than it was. In his first game with the new specs, he didn't throw a strike until his 18th pitch.
When he finally found a reliable pair of goggles, he started winning, but he still wasn't eating, not enough, anyway. He talked again to the Dodger psychologist and finally accepted that his parents' divorce wasn't his fault. But the breakthrough was living in his in-laws' basement in the winter after the 1999 season and seeing how a relationship is supposed to work. "My parents are kissing all the time,'" Valerie says. “And then my grandma arrives and she kisses everybody.'" He and Valerie even found a food he would actually indulge in: sushi. Every day it was broiled crab rolls, a dozen at a time, to the point that he was almost roly-poly.
When he hit the bigs for good in 2001, no one knew the real story. All they saw was his circus pitch, the changeup that Brian Jordan would name after the one in the cartoon in which Bugs gets the Gashouse Gorillas to swing and miss three times on the same slowball. All they saw was his grisly goatee and his Kareem goggles. All they saw was his biohazard of a cap. "He was just a mess," Lo Duca says.
But that was the charm of Eric Gagne. He never wanted his colleagues to see him in his reading glasses, so he'd sit in the clubhouse squinting at his surroundings. His eyesight was deteriorating--he's needed three new prescriptions in the past two years--but he's still been known to bat in games without his goggles. He'd made himself into a tough guy, and he couldn't take it back.
At some point, his persona had gotten out of his control. Maybe because he'd taken his hockey player's intensity to the bullpen and reached 100 saves faster than any closer in history. Maybe because the Dodgers started flashing GAME OVER on the scoreboard and blaring "Welcome to the Jungle'" the moment he'd take the field. Maybe because he'd wanted to shave his chin this spring and his teammates wouldn't let him. Maybe because the famously jaded Dodger fans actually started staying all nine innings, for the first time in ages, just to see, him pump his ample fist. Maybe because hundreds of them took part in an Eric Gagne look-alike contest. ("Scary how much the winner looked like me,'" Gagne says.) Maybe because he'd crank Eminem in the clubhouse. And maybe because he'd given the Dodgers their swagger back.
He'd become the B.D.A., like it or not.
AND IT'S all such a lie.
Eric Gagne is leaving the stadium after his 82nd straight save, carrying a large, paper grocery bag. Is it food?
"No," he says. "Fan mail.”
He answers all of it, or does the best he can, and sometimes he1l even visit the fans in person. He's made a habit of visiting the Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA. And as T.J. Simers of the Los Angeles Times can attest, Gagne won't let reporters enter the rooms with him unless the kids are okay with it. A 9-year-old named Mario Castillo wasn't okay with it, so Gagne pulled him behind a curtain and offered to show him the secret. The secret of the Bugs Bunny changeup. "But you can't tell anybody," Gagne told him. "You have to promise."
When Gagne left, the boy was smiling, and Simers moseyed over to Mario. "You can tell me about the changeup," he said.
No way, Mario said.
"It's no big deal, Mario. I'm supposed to know these things."
Forget it, Mario said. And then he held up an autographed poster of an angry-looking Gagne pitching in the ninth. "Look how mean he gets," Mario said. "I promised."
Gagne, hearing about this later, sent up a jersey to Mario. And he signed it, "To the boy who can keep a secret."
The Dodgers’ front office hears these kind of stories, and they brag. Yes, the new owner, Frank McCourt, has changed the atmosphere in Dodger Stadium. Yes, the team's on its way to 3.4 million in attendance. But none of it would matter if the Dodgers didn't have a chance to make the playoffs for the first time since 1996, or if Lo Duca and Adrian Beltre weren't candidates for Comeback Player of the Year, or if Gagne weren't so automatic.
The Dodgers so depend on Gagne that, a year and a half ago, Lo Duca and the other clubhouse leaders asked him to stop taking BP, for fear he'd pull a muscle. "I know one guy can't win the pen¬nant," pitcher Jose Lima says, "but Gagne's close." He was late to the clubhouse a few weeks ago, thanks to LA gridlock, and the players were somewhat concerned. When he finally arrived, only 90 minutes before the first pitch, there was only one way to express-their relief: they blared "Welcome to the Jungle" as he walked through the door. "I guess I'm gonna hear that song every time I make an entrance," says Gagne.
"Without him, we're in trouble," says Roberts. "In the past, you'd hear that the Dodgers have that Hollywood image, and I think some people might construe it as being soft. But when you've got a guy like Eric Gagne, that toughness and attitude carries over."
If they knew his real story, though, his teammates would realize the B.D.A. is just a B.D.T.B. (Big Dumb Teddy Bear). They have no idea that the scar above his right eye isn’t from hockey (Valerie got her hair caught on his pierced eyebrow a few years back, and Gagne had to rip the piercing out.) That he's scared to get Lasik surgery to correct his vision. That he has 50 pairs of glasses at home, some of them horn-rimmed. That he just wrote a children's book called Break Barriers, touching on his eating disorder and his parents' divorce. That he doesn't speak in team meetings because he's hopelessly shy. That he keeps the 55 baseballs from last year's portion of his save streak in a brown paper sack. Or that the first time his mom saw him earn a save at Dodger Stadium, she began to weep. "She and the rest of my family are overwhelmed," Gagne says. "See, to them, I'm still the same little guy from Mascouche."
In Los Angeles, his face is up on billboards. He and his wife laugh at what's become of his image, and in particular, they laugh about the sweat¬stained cap that's such a big part of it.
"It's disgusting," says Valerie, who's also French¬-Canadian. "Don't put it on my head. Sometimes I am watching him on TV and I'm saying people will think he's a dirty person, that he never cleans, never showers. Every time I meet a new person, they ask me about the hat. I just tell them he says it doesn't smell.
“And sometimes people ask me, 'Is he nice with you?' What? I would not be with him if he was not nice. But people just get the feeling he's kind of aggressive. Maybe it's the goatee."
But the Brillo doesn't get people out. Gagne saves games because he works out for 90 minutes in the clubhouse every day. Because his fastball hits 98 mph, and that Bugs Bunny changeup reg¬isters 86. ("That's only a 12 mph difference, but to hitters it seems more like 60," says Lima.) Because he also has a 68 mph slurve that he's not afraid to throw 10 straight times if he knows a hitter can't touch it. Because whenever he hears "Welcome to the Jungle," he breaks into a cold sweat. "Gets him in the mood," Valerie says. For 678 days, it worked like a charm.
And then, on the night he blew his first save in almost two years, his teammates saved him, and beat the Diamondbacks in 10 innings. "We owed him one--or 80," says Roberts.
When he did his interviews that night, he did them with his chest puffed out, knowing he couldn't let anybody see him droop, especially not the impressionable fellows in his clubhouse. He kept his eyeglasses in his pocket, and he told the media he'd start another streak soon, maybe one that lasted--gulp--longer.
And then he was out the door, glasses on. The sushi was waiting.
4. New icon. Feel free to doubt me on this, but I SWEAR this is Matthew Lewis at the OotP premiere. No further comment.