Friday, Jul 4, 2008
The save is a dumb stat, but let's not shortchange Eric Gagne. Plus: Why doesn't anybody worry about Maria Sharapova's schooling like they worry about Maurice Clarett's?
Jul 7, 2004 | ESPN's "SportsCenter" asked viewers Tuesday night to compare Dodgers reliever Eric Gagne's consecutive save streak, which ended Monday, to the historic streaks of Cal Ripken Jr., Joe DiMaggio and Orel Hershiser. Gagne got smoked.
Only 6 percent of the 200,000-plus viewers who voted thought Gagne's 84 save chances without a blown one was a greater feat than Ripken's 2,632 consecutive games played, DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak or Hershiser's 59-inning shutout streak, which finished ahead of Gagne in that order.
I was heartened by that result because I think it showed baseball fans have really come to appreciate how bogus a stat the save is. Saves are the single most meaningless stat that anyone pays attention to in the major American sports. I'm not counting silly invented stats that nobody cares about, but I am counting hockey assists.
I think the days are finally gone when a lousy reliever with a sky-high ERA and a big bunch of saves is thought of as a terrific pitcher by the average fan.
But folks, come on. The pendulum has swung a bit too far. Forget the saves: This guy has been really good. I won't bore you with numbers, because they're all over the Net anyway and I don't like to mar the beauty of my elegant prose with them, but jumpin' monkey boogers, if I did show them to you, you'd snort coffee through your nose. Gagne's been that good with the game on the line.
As Jayson Stark of ESPN.com points out, the Elias Sports Bureau has a stat called quality saves, which is an imperfect but better measure of when a reliever really saves a game, since it looks only at games in which the tying run was in scoring position when the reliever came in or he protected a one-run lead for an inning or more. Gagne has led everybody in that stat during the streak, by a lot.
There has to be plenty of luck involved in any long streak. Just as one example, a more nimble first baseman than Olmedo Saenz might have fielded the base hit Monday that let the tying run score for Arizona and ended the save streak. There are any number of ways a guy can blow a save despite pitching beautifully. Errors, bloops, passed balls, seeing-eye grounders. In the same way, you need a few cheap hits or friendly scorer's calls to keep a hitting streak alive.
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