Classroom Closers?
After spending yesterday afternoon watching my beloved Boston Red Sox blow another game in the ninth inning, I was reminded of a simple fact: some losses are more emotionally significant than others.
As my disappointment threatened to disrupt the rest of my Memorial Day – we were so close! – I realized there’s a good argument to be made that the one statistic in the data-obsessed world of professional baseball most likely to at least partially reflect the collective confidence of a team is the one the Sox’s shaky new closer, Alfredo Aceves, failed to earn for his team yesterday: the save.
Ironically, saves didn’t even exist as an official statistic until 1960, when baseball writer Jerome Holtzman proposed it as a way to better measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers. Since then, the relevance of the stat
As my disappointment threatened to disrupt the rest of my Memorial Day – we were so close! – I realized there’s a good argument to be made that the one statistic in the data-obsessed world of professional baseball most likely to at least partially reflect the collective confidence of a team is the one the Sox’s shaky new closer, Alfredo Aceves, failed to earn for his team yesterday: the save.
Ironically, saves didn’t even exist as an official statistic until 1960, when baseball writer Jerome Holtzman proposed it as a way to better measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers. Since then, the relevance of the stat