Eric Gagne, the formerly dominant 30-year old closer for the Los Angeles Dodgers has been shut down for the rest of the season as a result of having back surgery. The team has said that Gagne’s back injury “had nothing to do with baseball-related activity” since the 2003 National League Cy Young award winner has been on the disabled list since June and has made only sixteen appearances over the past two seasons.

This is, of course, pure nonsense.

To believe that a 30-year old professional baseball player just wakes up one morning with severe back pain as a result of herniated disks that necessitate immediate surgery and that this injury has nothing to do with a baseball-related activity, a person would have to be naïve to an almost fatal degree.

Saturday night it was learned that Kerry Wood, who many thought to be the heir apparent as baseball’s next great power pitcher, has a partial tear in his rotator cuff. As a result of this injury Wood’s career is in jeopardy. At least the Cubs haven’t proclaimed that Wood’s injury isn’t baseball related.

In this day and age when a young athlete – especially a baseball player and a pitcher – experiences a total physical breakdown, the coverage of this story must discuss the player’s possible performance-enhancing drug use, their off-field/off-season training regimen or a combination of the two.

Over the past few years we have seen three prominent young pitchers suffer injuries of varying degrees of severity — Kerry Wood, Mark Prior and Eric Gagne. Wood’s and Gagne’s injuries are the most severe at this point, but even Prior’s injury woes during the early stage of his career have people wondering if he’ll ever be healthy enough for a long enough period of time to reach his potential.

But we’ve seen little with regard to any info that deals with the training/rehab regimens of these players. Since these pitchers were injured in off-season and/or off the field situations, we should have heard a lot more about just what these guys are doing in their preparation.

And we haven’t heard anything about the possibility that PEDs could be responsible for these young pitchers breaking down.

A lot of people may not like to hear this, but in the year 2006 PEDs need to be discussed whenever anything unusual occurs in baseball whether it be “good” or “bad.”

Eric Gagne had a meteoric rise, as he went from mediocre starter to one of the most dominant – for a short-term – closers of all time. Gagne‘s dominance – he holds the major league record with 84 consecutive saves - came about after a period during which he underwent Tommy John surgery. He pitched unimpressively for several seasons before exploding on the scene with a fastball that was clocked in the high 90s during the 2001 season when he was predominantly as starter.