Eric Gagne: 80 percent of Los Angeles Dodgers used PEDs
Los Angeles Dodgers closer Eric Gagne pumps his fist after striking out the San Francisco Giants' Marquis Grissom to end the game and preserve a 7-6 win, Sunday, April 18, 2004, in San Francisco Credit: AP
Eric Gagne is throwing his former Dodgers teammates a heater high and tight.
According to ESPNLosAngeles.com, Gagne, in a new French-language book, estimates that 80 percent of those he played with in Los Angeles were using performance enhancing drugs.
“I was intimately aware of the clubhouse in which I lived,” Gagne says in the book, titled “Game Over: The Story of Eric Gagne.”
“I would say that 80 percent of the Dodgers players were consuming them.”
Gagne, who was 33-26 with a 3.47 ERA and 187 saves during a 10-season career, won the National League Cy Young Award in 2003 after striking out 137 batters in 82.1 innings for the Dodgers. Gagne pitched for the Dodgers from 1999-2006 and played for Texas and Boston in 2007. He last pitched for Milwaukee in 2008, going 4-3 with a 5.44 ERA and 10 saves.
ESPN reports that Gagne says he used human growth hormone over five cycles during a three-year period near the end of his career.
“It was sufficient to ruin my health, tarnish my reputation and throw a shadow over the extraordinary performances of my career,” he says.
Gagne doesn't name names, though former teammates Paul Lo Duca and Kevin Brown (along with Gagne himself) were implicated in PED usage when their names surfaced in the Mitchell Report, an independent study commissioned by MLB into the use of PEDs. Here's a link to the 2003 Dodgers roster.
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