I was responding to eanelson4, who seemed to be linking his expectations of Gagne to his salary. Precisely. If Doug Melvin is willing to sink $10 million into a guy, I expect him to do well. We could have signed some middle of the road guy like Riske for $4 million to put in the closer role and hopefully go 9/14 on save opportunities. The extra $6 million comes from the team demanding results. If a guy is getting paid well to do a job, he should perform. If he is not, move on (or in this case we have Gagne for a 1 year contract). In the case of Suppan's ridiculous contract, you have to blame the inflated market for starters. Closers, however, only have to pitch 1 inning, maybe 2, so I think there are many more players out there that would make capable closers than there are that would make capable starters. I think Gagne is being paid like a good closer who happened to be in free agency last year. Elite closers who were free (or re-done) coming into this season got much more. Cordero - 4yr/$46M; Rivera - 3yr/$45M; Joe Nathan - 4yr/47M. I have a few problems with this statement: 1) Yes, his is being paid like a good closer, but he hasn't been one, which is the problem. Time will tell here, hopefully he gets it together 2) $12M is not that much more than $10M. It is documented that had Melvin known that the Reds only offered Cordero $2-3M more per year than the brewers that he would have done it. My point is that we could be paying a guy far less, and save some money for later years or something, to do the job that Gagne has done so far. Again, time will only tell though. Overall, I just fail to see how we can completely ignore the size of a guy's contract. That is a judge of their abilities. If they get paid large sums of money, we should expect results, especially when we don't have enough money to overpay players like the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, etc. Thats my thought on why I keep bringing up the money aspect of it.