Kill the save

Jerome Holtzman, a sports writer for over thirty years and the inventor of the Save rule, died on Saturday at the age of 81. Hopefully the Save rule he created, like a distraught wife, will follow him to the grave.

The main problem with saves is that pitchers have no control over save opportunities; that's not the only problem though. It wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that most people look first at the number of saves a guy has, than, maybe, at the rest of his stats. All the talk this year of K-Rod going after the saves record, for example, obscures the fact that he's not the best reliever in baseball. Or even the second best.

	ERA	SO	BB	IP	WHIP	SV	VORP
K-Rod	2.20	47	28	45	1.244	41	15.7
J. Nathan	1.11	46	11	40.7	0.959	27	19.3
M. Rivera	1.22	53	4	44.3	0.677	24	20.4

Of those three, the best one has the least amount of saves. K-Rod is a very good pitcher, but to talk about a guy who will likely not throw 100 innings this season as an MVP is ludicrous. The culprit here is not K-Rod but the save stat itself. The only reason K-Rod has so many saves is because he's had so many more save opportunities then the other two pitchers listed. They all have about the same amount of innings pitched, but Nathan and Rivera are better than K-Rod in every way possible except saves and even with saves it depends on how you look at it.

	SV	BLSV	PCT
K-Rod	41	3	93
J. Nathan	27	2	93
M. Rivera	24	0	100

The save has greatly distorted the value of the closer role and doesn't really serve any purpose; relievers can be looked at with the same basic pitching metrics as starters. The whole point of the save was to give the relievers something akin to a win, but the win is a BS stat too, we don't need a stat so that a subgroup of pitchers gets their own stat similar to another group of pitcher's stat, but not quite. There is also a stat called 'holds', intended to be like a save for middle relievers. The hold is yet another BS stat to give to yet another subgroup of pitchers for no good reason other than to give out more stats that don't mean anything. Do you know that Carlos Marmol of the Chicago Cubs leads MLB in holds with 22? Do you think he even knows?

I'm tilting at windmills here, but baseball should get rid of the hold and save, they're both useless and don't properly reward performance.