Idiots Write About Sports

The “driving on the sidewalk” save which Jason mentioned is a term coined neither by Jason nor myself. Rather, it comes from crabby New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick to point out the folly of awarding a save to a closer who came in the ninth with a three-run lead only to cough up two runs, load the bases and then escape with a one-run win. That, Mushnick argues, is like giving a driver who steers his car onto the sidewalk a good-driving citation when he doesn’t wind up killing anybody.

I have no proof of this, but I assume Mushnick was thinking of former Oakland closer and current White Sox liability Billy Koch when he came up with the term. Koch had 44 saves for the A’s last year — good enough for second in the American League — and I don’t think more than half of them came in 1-2-3 innings.

The save stat is the only one people seem to pay attention to when talking about relief pitchers… and in this age of specialty relief situations, it may well be the most meaningless stat in baseball. It doesn’t reflect the value of a pitcher like Chad Bradford, who gets brought in with runners on base in the sixth or seventh inning, and it over-inflates the value of someone like Koch or Armando Benitez or INSERT NAME OF HATED RELIEF PITCHER FOR YOUR FAVORITE SQUADRON HERE.

Trouble is, I’m not sure if there’s a single stat out there that does accurately reflect a relief pitcher’s value. Calculating the percentage of inherited runners who score gives you some idea of a pitcher’s effectiveness — except when they’re brought in without anyone on base. Some sort of walks-to-strikeouts ratio or walks-plus-hits divided by innings pitched might do the trick, but it’s not like relievers have that many innings to give you an accurate representation. Rob Neyer wrote some interesting stuff Friday on evaluating Eric Gagne and John Smoltz — but that would seem to only work when you’re talking about pitchers as dominant as Gagne and Smoltz have been this season.

In the mean time, we’re stuck with the same lousy way of rewarding relief pitchers with the meaningless save statistic. As I write this, Boston’s Byung-Hung Kim entered today’s Red Sox-Orioles game with a 6-3 lead, gave up a home run to Brook Fordyce, allowed one other hit, walked a batter — and picked up his first American League save.

Get that man a safe driving award.