Sometimes I lie awake worrying about the fate of humankind.
The way I see it, we're in trouble.
It's the strangest thing. We humans can travel to the moon and back; we can map the human genome; we can vaccinate against polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, what have you; and we can invent amazing things like computers, televisions, planes, trains, automobiles and microwave ovens that can produce entire meals in seconds. But for some reason, we still can't devise reasonable statistical metrics to tell us how good people are at playing baseball.
Wait — scratch that. We can devise them, and in fact we have. It's just that most of us are too dense to pay any attention. I've complained about this problem before, but today I return to my complaining ways with renewed purpose.
This past Saturday the Angels' Francisco Rodriguez, one of the most perfectly mediocre bullpen aces in the American League, broke Bobby Thigpen's all-time record for saves in a single season, recording his 58th in a 5-2 win over last-place Seattle.
Hold on. Let's back up.
The save, a statistic invented by Jerome Holtzman in 1969, is used to measure how many times a relief pitcher has (1) finished a win for his team; (2) not earned a "win" (don't get me started); and (3) entered the game with a lead of three runs or less, or entered with the tying run on base, or at bat, or on deck, or pitched for three innings. Wow. That was a lot of "and"s and "or"s.
The save, Holtzman theorized, would be the perfect metric to gauge a pitcher's effectiveness at closing games. But as it turned out, the stat is terribly misleading, as it is largely reliant on the manager's use of the pitcher, on the team's performance and on several kilotons of luck.
I do not fault Jerome Holtzman. By all accounts the late Holtzman, who died in July at the age of 82, was one of the greatest sportswriters Chicago has ever seen. He is a widely respected journalist and a Baseball Hall of Famer. With regard to the save, I view him much the same way I view Aristotle, who posited that the Earth was the center of the universe — terribly wrong, but worthy of respect. Simply sparking discussion is an important step.
But it troubles me that almost 40 years later, the public has focused so much attention on Rodriguez and his "accomplishment" this season. Rodriguez and his 58 saves are intriguing because by most reasonable metrics, he is having a bit of a down year at age 26. His strikeout rate per nine innings, a superb 11.74 for his career, has dipped to 10.28 this year, and he's no longer the unhittable force he once was. By Baseball Prospectus' Adjusted Runs Prevented stat (look it up!), Rodriguez is the 26th best relief pitcher in baseball.
But because so many baseball people are so slow to question conventional wisdom, here we are anointing Rodriguez as our new bullpen king.
This goes beyond Rodriguez's undeserved mention in baseball's record book, and beyond his undeserved consideration in the AL's races for Cy Young and MVP. Those things worry me, but this problem goes deeper.
I'm wondering which team, too rich for its own good, is about to overspend by tens of millions of dollars this offseason to land a pitcher who's turning 27 but peaked at 22? Which pitchers will get shafted in future free-agent markets because they don't compare to Rodriguez in the oh-so-overvalued save category? And in which decade will Angels manager Mike Scioscia, a former Manager of the Year, finally realize that he's costing his team wins by misusing his pitching staff simply to inflate a meaningless, contrived number?
These are the real questions that inquisitive, intellectual, curious baseball fans should be asking. But these days, all too often, these are the questions being ignored. This is not progress — this is willful ignorance. Somehow, I doubt it's what Jerome Holtzman would have wanted.
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Evans Clinchy is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at Evans.Cinchy@tufts.edu.
