Starting in , a relief pitcher earned a save when he entered the game with his team in the lead and held the lead for the remainder of the game, provided that he was not credited with the victory.
A relief pitcher could not be credited with a save if he did not finish the game unless he was removed for a pinch hitter or a pinch runner. When one or more relief pitchers qualified for a save under the provisions of this rule, the official scorer would credit the save to the pitcher he judged to have been the most effective. Before the season, the save rule was modified and simplified.
Under this new rule, a relief pitcher earned a save under one of two conditions:. A pitcher could be credited with the save even if he had not finished the game, provided he had been removed either for a pinch hitter or a pinch runner. When more than one pitcher was in a position to qualify for a save, the official scorer had to judge which of them had been most effective and award the save to him.
It was possible, under both earlier versions of the save rule, to see boxscores in which pitchers were credited with saves in situations where they would not earn them under the current rule. See for example the game of April 25, , where Claude Raymond entered the game with a four-run lead in the ninth but was awarded a save anyway: [1]. For games played before , saves have been figured retroactively using the definition.
The save was created as a statistic as a result of a lobbying effort by sportswriter Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Sun-Times during the s. He argued that traditional pitching statistics - relief wins and losses - were not adequate in capturing the work done by relief specialists and proposed the save as a way of measuring the number of times a relief pitcher was successful in one of the most critical missions that he had to accomplish - preserving a lead.
The Sporting News , a weekly publication for which Holtzman also wrote, began calculating saves several seasons before the scoring rules provided an official definition. The save has become so much an integral part of the contemporary game that a special category of relief pitcher - the closer - has emerged. Closers rarely enter a game except in save situations. This practice is in marked contrast to earlier patterns of bullpen usage, where the relief ace would be used in all situations where the game was close, either with his team in the lead, or tied, or trailing by one or two runs, and often for two or three innings or more.
Nowadays, closers generally record few victories and often have losing records. This was not the case previously, as pitchers such as Roy Face in , Dick Radatz in or and John Hiller in , would pick up large numbers of victories in addition to saves figured retroactively in the case of those pitching before Another way to illustrate how the usage of top relievers has changed over the past four decades is to compare Hall of Fame reliever Rollie Fingers , who pitched in the s and early s , and Trevor Hoffman , who retired after the season and is second on the all-time list, have been used.
Of Fingers' career saves, entailed pitching two or more innings, including 36 of three or more innings. In contrast, at the end of the season, Hoffman had career saves, but only 7 of two or more innings, and none of three or more.
Fingers obtained of his saves when he entered the game with either the winning or tying run already on base; for Hoffman, only 36 of his saves had come in such situations. There has been a lot of criticism of how the emergence of the save as the master statistic in evaluating contemporary relief pitchers has affected usage. Modern closers often pitch no more than about 70 innings a season, and in most of the games in which they pitch, their teams are already in the lead.
Teams rely increasingly on a group of often unheralded middle relief specialists to hold the lead until the closer enters the game. Enter the game with the tying run in the on-deck circle -- or closer to scoring.
Pitch at least three innings. Origin The term save was used by general managers in the s, without specific parameters. More from Pitching. Connect with MLB. All rights reserved. Saves AP. Rate this:. Like this: Like Loading Leave a comment Comments 4. Constantine Kostarakis September 1, at I think the save statistic has been a detriment to the game of baseball.
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