What, Exactly, Is a Save?

Or, more to the point, what should it be? That’s the question David Pinto asks at Baseball Prospectus [tip o' the Knuckle Curve cap to reader Didi]. After running through a brief history of the save’s evolution as a baseball statistic, Pinto drops this little bomb:

It’s time to decouple the save from the person who finishes the game, and start awarding it to the reliever who does the most to increase the chance of his team winning. This should encourage managers to use their best pitchers in game situations, and still allow these pitchers to gather saves to use to negotiate contracts.

Of course, he’s right. The contract negotiation issue is an important point. Saves are viewed by many as the definitive stat for relievers, which means that closers typically are more expensive than their seventh- and eighth-inning brethren. (This, incidentally, can be exploited by small-market teams that choose to spread wealth across several middle relievers rather than dump all their money into the ninth-inning basket, but I digress.)

Pinto offers a set of rules that seem fairly straightforward to folks who are accustomed to analyzing such things. Sure, other people may be confused by a save rule that follows Pinto’s model, but is the goal of a statistic to be easily understood or to measure something meaningful?

As with everything else in baseball, if change does occur, it will do so at its own pace. In other words, you are advised to keep breathing…