Baseball's save statistic is silly.
Now, it's not as lame as win-loss record, which somehow still has a presence in 2015 despite every indication that it's the bluntest of instruments to measure pitcher performance. I thought we were ready to "kill the win" in 2010, when Felix Hernandez took the American League Cy Young award with a 13-12 record, but it stubbornly persists five years later.
The save has proven to be just as cockroach-like.
Invented by sports writer Jerome Holtzman in 1959 and officially adopted by Major League Baseball 10 years later, the save means well. The problem is that its requirements are so situation-dependent that a reliever could allow two runs and three more baserunners and still "earn" the save, just as someone who pitched a perfect ninth with a one-run lead would.
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