Call me a skeptic, but I'm one of those who doesn't believe that Eric Gagne will ever return to the form that won him the Cy Young. And for cheating like he did, he doesn't deserve to ever be mentioned in the same sentence as the great Mariano Rivera no matter what he does from here on.
So your team already has a dominant set-up man and closer, what do you do? Well, if you're Red Sox GM Theo Epstein you break it up, of course. Epstein (who got rid of half of the '04 world championship team mere minutes after they won it all) still doesn't the idea that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Eric Gagne has been horrible since he got traded to the Red Sox, yet considering Gagne's history, no one could've predicted that. But the idea that the Red Sox needed Gagne in the first place is ludicrous considering that Hideki Okajima and Jonathan Papelbon were already doing a superb job for the back of the pen. And now that the Sox are back in a pennant race, they can look no further than Epstein if they end up as a wildcard or worse yet, missing the playoffs entirely.
