Shutdowns and Meltdowns Should Kill the Save

[SunDevil]

Shutdowns and Meltdowns Should Kill the Save | FanGraphs Baseball

On Friday, Jonah Keri penned an impassioned plea to kill the save statistic.

If you’re an Indians fan still rattled by Thursday’s disaster, or just a baseball fan sick of suboptimal decisions resulting in painful losses, the man to blame is a late Chicago sportswriter named Jerome Holtzman. Fifty-three years ago, in an effort to shift more recognition unto underappreciated relief pitchers, Holtzman invented the save statistic. Today, that invention is responsible for far more unintended consequences, and far more heartache, than Holtzman could have ever intended. Bloody battles are fought over the ill-begotten riches that saves bestow on those who can get them. Managers lose games for their teams by getting seduced by saves. Pitchers who fail in save situations get labeled as gutless pariahs.

It needs to end now. It’s time to kill the save, send it to hell, and strand it there for eternity.

In case you missed the subtlety, Jonah’s not a big fan of the save, or more accurately, not a big fan of the repercussions that valuing saves has had on modern day bullpen usage. As the save has grown in popularity, so has the rigidity of bullpen roles, and reliever usage has been modified to specifically fit the definition of the save that was created by Holtzman. It is one of the few instances in sports where obtaining a statistic, rather than maximizing a team’s chances of winning, actually drives how teams utilize their players.

However, as Jonah notes, the current system is so entrenched in the economics of today’s game that it isn’t as simple as just convincing teams to stop managing in a certain style. Reliever compensation is driven very heavily by the amount of saves a pitcher can compile, and any attempt to move away from the save as a measure of value could be viewed by skeptical players as simply an effort to drive down costs. If Major League Baseball is ever going to move away from the save as a driving force of reliever valuation, it has be replaced by a system that would be acceptable and understandable by the relievers themselves, and teams would have to make a concerted effort to explain why a redistribution of funds without a reduction in total expenditures on relievers would actually be an improvement for relievers as a whole.

In order to get that kind of wide scale acceptance, the metric replacing saves would have to be approachable and easily explained, and also line up with what relievers understand their job to be – come into close games and preserve a lead or keep the deficit to a minimum. Any metric that is context neutral will never be accepted by those within the game, as reliever performance is inextricably tied to the situation into which a pitcher is placed. Any stat that seeks to displace the save has to take the inning, score, and base/out situation into consideration.

That leads us to WPA, but getting teams and players on board with using a stat that gives them credit for +0.24 wins in a given performance isn’t going to be an easy transition. So, what’s needed is a metric that accounts for leverage-specific performance and preferably looks like saves and blown saves, so it can be offered up as an easy-to-understand improvement on an outdated system.

Enter Shutdowns and Meltdowns. Quoting Jonah again:

This might sound a bit complicated, but it really isn’t. By using 6 percent as the cutoff, you get a stat that runs on a similar scale to saves and holds. Elite closers and setup men will rack up 35-40 (or more) shutdowns and very few meltdowns, just as a dominant closer can earn that many saves, while blowing very few. If you’ve ever watched poker on TV, you’ll see a player’s odds of winning a hand rise or fall by a certain percentage based on the cards the dealer flips over. Same easy-to-follow concept here: If you retire the side 1-2-3 in a big spot (say, two runners on, none out, and you enter with the game tied in the seventh), you get a shutdown, just as hitting your nut flush on the river will usually win you a hand. The only difference is the pitcher has more control over the outcome in this case, rather than it being left to random chance.

The key is that SD/MD puts closers and other members of your bullpen on even ground. That way you don’t end up overpaying for a pitcher who happens to record the final out of a ballgame. Greatness is greatness, and it gets rewarded whenever it might occur during the course of a game. We know that at least one relief pitcher has adopted SD/MD to track his own performance: Daniel Bard kept close tabs on the stat before getting converted back to a starter’s role this offseason.

The big barrier to acceptance is going to be getting players on board with being evaluated by something other than saves, and we know that at least one Major League pitcher has already bought into the value of SD/MD. Naturally, it’s a reliever who was dramatically undervalued by the current system, and found that SD/MD better represented how valuable he actually was to his team. Getting good setup men and middle relievers on board will obviously be easier than getting closers on board, since a shift in reliever valuation will move money from ninth inning guys to seventh and eighth inning guys.

Still, that redistribution is something that the majority players should be in favor of. Very few players come up as closers, and most elite relievers spent a few years toiling as a setup man before getting promoted to the big chair. In order to become a closer, they had to perform very well in that earlier inning role, and they generally received little to no compensation for those performances. By moving to a system that paid relievers based on Shutdowns and Metldowns, relievers would become more highly valued earlier in their careers, and the shift to receiving real paychecks earlier would transfer money to guys who have previously been underpaid and then gone down with severe injuries before they could ever cash in on their success.

In reality, many of the best relievers in the sport don’t last six years, and if they don’t become a closer early in their career, their arbitration payouts are limited due to their lack of saves. It’s completely possible for a high quality reliever to have a good five year run and never really get rewarded financially for that success. For instance, Mike Adams has recorded 103 Shutdowns and only 24 Meltdowns over the last six years, and his 81% SD/MD rate is eighth best in baseball since 2006, ranking between Francisco Rodriguez and Rafael Soriano on the leaderboard. Despite that, Adams will make $4.4 million this year after his third trip through arbitration, and he’s garnered a grand total of just over $9 million in his career. Soriano made $18 million before he became a free agent, while Rodriguez made just over $21 million in those same six years.

By replacing saves and holds with Shutdowns and Meltdowns, Major League teams could more accurately reward those players who actually perform well out of the bullpen, and could move towards a system where managers weren’t beholden to an outdated statistic. By getting rid of the save as a valuation metric, teams could more efficiently utilize their best relievers while also still ensuring that they were financially rewarded for pitching well in critical situations. The binary nature of SD/MD will appeal to players who see their job as “success or fail” based on how their performance directly affects the scoreboard, and the fact that it scales very similarly to saves can help it receive acceptance that other measures never will.

Jonah’s absolutely right – Major League Baseball should begin taking steps to kill the save statistic, but they can only do that if they have a worthy successor in place that Major League players will adopt as a replacement. Shutdowns and Meltdowns can be that successor. We don’t have to be slaves to the save anymore.

[kq76]

Interesting enough, but after reading that I still had no idea how they were calculated. This link helped, but still, it's not something most can easily recognize like we unfortunately can with the save.

[lightgrenade07]

Personally, I favor the goose egg. It's a much more straightforward statistic to calculate, track, and understand. I can't imagine trying to explain the WPA calculations to my grandmother; it's very easy to explain "giving up no runs in an inning."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...lief-pitchers/

[dsvitak]

IRS...or Inherited Runners Score. That's the #1 responsibility for a reliever, to come in and put out the fire.

ERA isn't going to work, saves encompass WAY too much, like the potential tying run is still on his way to the ballpark, and even wins don't tell the whole story.

WHIP, and IRS.

[Westheim]

Sounds like just a more esoteric version of a W-L record, but for relievers. Nah.

ERA is a bit useless for relievers, but I'm also not a fan of IRS, because not all IR's are equal. Would hate to be the guy that always gets called on with runners on second and third and nobody out if that ends up determining my paycheck for next year.

WHIP, FIP, K/BB, and WPA would paint a much better picture. Wouldn't you know that Boom-Boom Diaz has walked everything with legs and added zilch wins by WPA to the 2024 Mets?

[low]

I've always thought saves were dumb. This is better than saves, but it's still not great.

[Amazin69]

The Save has been official for 56 years now. It has the benefit of familiarity, and I can't even bother to read that giant block of ancient text on the proposed change. Occam's Razor, I say.

(And I think Boom-Boom's terrible Save Percentage and the fact that he recorded all of TWO saves in the entire month of August tell us all we need to know.)

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Amazin69

The Save has been official for 56 years now. It has the benefit of familiarity, and I can't even bother to read that giant block of ancient text on the proposed change. Occam's Razor, I say.

LOL. "I refuse to read a post longer than 140 characters so I'm just going to stick with the dumbest possible way of doing things." And saves are simple (Occam's razor)? Do you even remember how saves are determined? I'd be impressed by anyone who could fully recite the rule without looking any of it up. I certainly couldn't, I'd forget something for sure.

[kq76]

First, while it probably doesn't matter, people might like to know that the thread was started in 2012. This isn't a new concept and it's been in OOTP for a while now. I switched to looking at them years ago.

Second, goose eggs (GEs) aren't that much different from shutdowns and meltdowns (SDs & MDs). It's almost like the creator of GEs came across SDs & MDs, tweaked them a little bit, gave them a new name, and said, "look at what I created everyone, I'm your savior from saves"! The article doesn't credit them, but it does credit another similar system.

One thing GEs have over SDs & MDs is it more clearly details when they've happened. With SDs and MDs you have to look up a reliever's WPA for the game. But with GEs it's clear, "credit for throwing a scoreless inning when it’s the seventh inning or later and the game is tied or his team leads by no more than two runs.". The GEs article has a nice little image that visualizes the situations for us and there's not many. SDs could really do with the same, but I'm not sure it'd be so easy to come up with an image for it. And the why leads us into my problem with GEs.

GEs are too limited. We're already in an age where a lot of relievers are coming into the game in the 5th and 6th innings, not alone the 7th or later. If you want the 7th to be the cutoff, so be it, but if a situation in the 6th has the same or higher leverage than a situation in the 7th, why should we not credit relievers with the higher leverage situation? Isn't the whole point of this to give credit where credit is due? While SDs care about WPA, they don't really care about what inning the WPA occurred in and I think that makes more sense.

Another problem with GEs is it lies to you. That is, it's not nearly as simple as what I quoted earlier. As it should, it can take into considerations situations in which the reliever doesn't start the inning, but in doing so it loses its simplicity. No, in truth what determines GEs is just as, if not more, complicated than what determines saves. I won't quote it all, but it's highlighted in grey in the article. SDs & MDs however, stay true to their promise of simplicity. They're only ever about +/- .06 WPA. There's no bait and switch about them like there is with GEs.

And when you look at the more detailed definition of GEs there are other possible issues. While I like that a run "cooks a goose egg", regardless of whether it's earned or not, I suspect many would balk at that (I think there are too many times when runs are tallied as "unearned" when they actually are earned). But what about letting IRS when they don't put you down or tie the game? I kind of like that too, but do others? And what about getting a GE when only getting 1 out when 2 are on? That seems weak, doesn't it?

Another thing GEs maybe has over SDs & MDs is you can get multiple in a game whereas with SDs & MDs you can only get one. I'm not sure this a good thing however. I mean at first it sounds better, right? If you pitched so well that you'd get multiple GEs, shouldn't you get more credit? Or should we say, "no, that was one great performance; sure, you were on for one game, but we want to know how many games you were on for a full season"? I'm not sure which side of this I fall on. The good thing with SDs & MDs, however, is that if you wanted to give more credit for a single performance then you could instead just point to WPA itself. You don't have that option with GEs.

No, shutdowns and meltdowns probably are the simplest and best way to value what a reliever does even to this day. All that shutdowns really need to sell them is an image that shows the situations in which you'd get one as we just can't expect the average fan to have an idea of what .06 WPA is (just like we can't expect the average fan to remember all the save situations). And if a simple image just isn't possible, a clear minimum situation in which a reliever would get them (e.g., tie game to start the 7th) and then just say, "and if you think the situation you're currently looking at is probably of greater or equal leverage index then they'd probably get a shutdown for it too". Thankfully, WPA, SDs, and MDs are all easy to look up on FanGraphs.

FWIW, this past year Cleveland's Emmanuel Clase had the most SDs, the greatest difference between SDs & MDs, and the highest WPA of all pitchers, not just relievers, and by a wide margin even!

[kq76]

If it's not clear what is wrong with it, here are (just some of?) the problems with the save:

-You must finish the game. Why must you finish the game? Do we really only want to credit closers and no other relievers? Why? Say a pitcher pitches a 3 up, 3 down 8th when the game is tied. Do they get a save? No. Why? Because they didn't finish the game. But if that pitcher's team scores 3 runs in the top half of the 9th and the closer gives up 2 runs in the bottom of the 9th, do they get a save? Yes. Why? Because they finished the game. That's just silly.

-You can get a save if you enter the game with 3 runs, yet give up 2. Why 3? A 3-run lead is actually pretty safe. Sure, it's not as safe as a 4-run lead, but a 3-run lead in the 9th has a leverage of 0.9, which is actually 0.1 lower than a 3-run lead in the 5th! It might not make sense, but it's true as you have more outs to go in the 5th. It's really only 2-run leads where you should really be nervous headed into the 9th (a 1.8 leverage, double that of 0.9). It should be no more than a 2 run lead.

-If you finish the game after pitching 3 innings, you get a save, no matter what the score is or was. Yes, that's right, you could come into the game up 21-0, give up 20 runs in 3 innings and still get a save. That's a 30 ERA and you'd still get a save. Not a respectable 3.0 ERA, a 30.0 ERA! That's bonkers.

-You could enter the game in the 9th up 3 with 2 outs and a runner on 1st, throw a single pitch and still get a save? How? The runner on first breaks for second and the catcher throws them out. Why? Because, "Enter the game with the tying run in the on-deck circle, at the plate or on the bases." You entered the game with a 3-run lead, pitched only 1 pitch, and you yourself didn't get an out, your catcher did, and yet you get a save for that? Come on.

-You can't get a win and a save in the same game. Why in the world are we basing whether you can get a save based on another stupid statistic? We could just as well say you can't get a save if you happened to get 3 groundouts. Why should it matter? It's not like a win is some great reward and we shouldn't reward them with 2 different stats. It's not like we say, "well, we can't credit you with a hit or RBI because we already credited you with a home run". This is what determines whether a pitcher gets a win on their record by the way. Besides the basic rule, it's really up the official scorer who gets a win.

-All the nonsense about paying relievers based on how many saves they get. "Sorry, Joe. We know Herman over there playing for the Tigers is nowhere near as good as you, but he got a lot more saves last year. We'll talk to coach and ask him to consider bringing you into more save situations next year, but no guarantees of course." What? That's absurd. If you've got a great reliever on your roster, like Clase, you utilize him however you think you can best maximize your wins, not best maximize his tally of some stupid archaic stat.

No, the save is an atrocious stat that should have been banished from baseball long long ago.

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by kq76

LOL. "I refuse to read a post longer than 140 characters so I'm just going to stick with the dumbest possible way of doing things." And saves are simple (Occam's razor)? Do you even remember how saves are determined? I'd be impressed by anyone who could fully recite the rule without looking any of it up. I certainly couldn't, I'd forget something for sure.

That was a hell of a lot more than 140 characters, fyvm.

A save is when a pitcher gets the last out with the tying run on base or on deck. Or pitches the 9th inning after entering with a lead of no more than 3 runs, or pitches the final 3 innings, regardless of the lead. (Doug Bird once got a save in a game the Yankees won by 21-2.)

A lot simpler than all the crap in that antique OP, IMO. And anybody who doesn't think that getting the final out is the most important thing can take it up with Donnie Moore, amongst others. Navigating a theoretically-tricky situation in the 7th is nice. Actually winning the game is better.

Vegas doesn't pay off until the game goes final. (Or at least it didn't used to. Who knows what sort of crap DraftKings gets up to, these days? I stopped gambling before Billie Eilish was born.)

[kq76]

140 characters is a reference to old twitter. I will admit, the OP/article did itself a disservice by not going with the formula for SDs right up front, like the fangraphs article I originally linked to did. I'm sure I wasn't the only one thinking, "get to the point already".

You still forgot something: you can't have gotten the win. If you didn't look any of that up then bravo though. Maybe it's just that I dismissed it so long ago that I've successfully erased it from my memory since, but I couldn't remember much more than "stupid stat". Oh, and it's not if they got the "last out" under those conditions, it's if they "entered the game" under those conditions. I don't blame you for getting that wrong, maybe you did know that, but just mistyped.

I once thought SDs and MDs were complicated too, but once I read more about Win Probability Added (WPA) and got more accustomed to looking at them in OOTP (I replaced saves with them in my views), it became a lot simpler. Its biggest hurdle is definitely, "what exactly is 0.6 WPA?", but once you get a decent understanding of WPA it's not so bad. And on the plus side, it really helps you get a good grasp of which situations are high leverage and which aren't. It's like when you see those win expectancy stats on broadcasts. I understand some people don't like them, but I do like them. It's helped wrench up the tension for me. I mean, of course, most of us should be able to realize that a tie game in the 9th is of higher leverage than a tie game in the 5th, but I also know now that there isn't much reason to be worried about a 3-run lead to start the 9th while a 2-run lead to start the 9th is something to be worried about.

Sorry, I'm not sure I get the Donnie Moore reference. But if it's what I think it is ('86 ALCS'), the 9th is already a higher leverage situation and so closers do more easily get credit for SDs when performing well in those situations. It's just that SDs are not limited to closing situations, like they are with saves. Closing out games is still critically important, it's just not the only thing worth giving relievers credit for.

[low]

Originally Posted by kq76

LOL. "I refuse to read a post longer than 140 characters so I'm just going to stick with the dumbest possible way of doing things." And saves are simple (Occam's razor)? Do you even remember how saves are determined? I'd be impressed by anyone who could fully recite the rule without looking any of it up. I certainly couldn't, I'd forget something for sure.

Pretty much how I read that, too.

Originally Posted by kq76

No, the save is an atrocious stat that should have been banished from baseball long long ago.

That I agree with.

[Amazin69]

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.])

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by kq76

tI also know now that there isn't much reason to be worried about a 3-run lead to start the 9th while a 2-run lead to start the 9th is something to be worried about.

Clearly, you've never had Edlose Diaz as your "closer".
.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Amazin69

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.

Try to keep it in your pants. I don't even care about saves vs shutdowns and meltdowns (I do like the latter but I'm also in that crowd that enjoys goofy and meaningless stats like GWRBIs so I like saves too, and the damage that the save caused has already happened) but man, this chirping about other people being meanies because your original argument was poorly thought out is annoying as crap.