Save Author Meets Savior

Jerome Holtzman’s doctor belongs in the New York Mets bullpen, as he blows the save and allows Holtzman to die of a stroke at the age of 82. Few have done more to distort the importance of the 9th inning than Holtzman, who created the save statistic as a means to determine the effectiveness of relief pitchers in 1959 and saw it become the first new official statistic acknowledged by major league baseball in almost 50 years in 1969. In so doing, he allowed hundreds of marginal pitchers to rack up meaningless saves in games that were not in question by striking out the bottom of the order with a 3-run lead. In studies of games from the 1920s through today, there has been little change in the likelihood that a team that entered the 9th with a lead would win, whether the “closer” was involved or not. When not padding the pockets of the likes of Bobby Thigpen and Mark Davis, Holtzman was one of the great sportswriters of his generation, spending 30 years as a columnist for Baseball America, appearing in more than 1,000 consecutive issues, writing the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on baseball, providing the year-end summary of the baseball season for the Official Baseball Guide and chronicling an oral history of sportswriting in No Cheering in the Press Box.