Pretty funny how the post that serves no purpose but to insult me about "not reading any post longer than 140 characters" is itself only 11 words long. Thanks for your in-depth analysis, O pontiff.
Yes, you can't get both a win and a save in the same appearance, which anybody who has been on planet Earth since the Nixon inaugural knows. I did forget that was in the Official Definition of the Save (which was written when people thought that Holtzman's Baby was a confusing new-fangled gizmo), but I was presenting the common understanding of the stat, not trying to quote it verbatim.
Ditto how you can't save a mess you created yourself. Again, I was in "everybody KNOWS this" territory and didn't dot that "i". My bad.
In fairness to myself (since nobody else in this thread wants to be, given the cheap insults being flung), your original sneering comment was "Do you even remember how saves are determined?" and so I answered
that without bothering about the "fully recite the rule without looking it up" sub-clause, because it's a working knowledge that's important, not rote repetition.
It's like when some political buffoon tries to cite the "original intent" of the Constitution and I'm like "you do know the 9th Amendment exists, don't you?" I understand what the 9th
means; the fact that I can't recite it word-for-word (as I can with the Preamble) doesn't invalidate my point, IMO.
You're right that I didn't read the whole damn thing, though. Do these "shut downs" count, if the team doesn't win the game? If so, then surely they are as irrelevant as any consolation prize. Thomas Dewey led the polls in August, as did Michael Dukakis and Hillary Clinton. All that means is the election isn't in August. Getting out of the 7th doesn't mean spit if you can't finish the job.
If the "shut down"
is contingent on the team going on to win the game, then all you're doing as adding mere filigree to the actually-important stat. Because the only "shut downs" that occur in games where there isn't a save are the cases where the winning team piles on the runs after the "shut down" moment and therefore it wasn't really terribly necessary to prevent that 7th inning run from scoring, after all.
The whole thing reeks of Jonah Keri trying to make a name for himself by "inventing" a new stat, regardless of whether it's useful or not. I get that in "modern baseball", where the starter gets the hook after 5 innings (because he's thrown 75 pitches [or technically, blow-your-arm-out heaves] and that's as far as he can go) and then the bullpen holds that with Billy pitching the 6th and Bobby the 7th and Benny the 8th and Barry the 9th, that Bobby (or rather, Bobby's agent) may feel it's unfair that Barry gets the Save while the others have to settle for Holds, especially since it was Bobby who struck out "fearsome slugger" Harry Hairyballs (who strikes out 30% of the time and makes out 75% of the time, anyhow) and thus did the "important" shut down work…but Bobby's agent is full of it.
If Barry hadn't done his job, then Billy's and Bobby's and Benny's work wouldn't have meant squat. So. yes, the Save
is more important than the Hold and we don't need new names to try and recategorize it. Suck it, Bobby's agent!
(And suck it, Jonah Keri. Jerome Holtzman will always be more famous than you! Nanananananana!!!!
[Stop crying, Jonah. You'll live.])