It’s a general
assumption, especially among sabermetric types, that closers are overrated.
Most closers are just good relievers who weren’t good enough to start. Mariano
Rivera excluded of course since he is super awesome.
What does a closer
actually do? Does he close games? He does but that’s not what we say. We say he
‘saves’ games – he gets the ‘save’. Saving a game implies that the game was in
danger of being lost, but that’s not really the case with most saves. Very
rarely does the closer come on with the go-ahead run on base or at the plate
(unless he comes on during an inning as opposed to starting it. Even if we take
saving meaning a lead is in danger of being lost that really should apply to
the tying run being on base or at the plate, which doesn’t happen when a closer
starts an inning with a 2 or 3-run lead.
If we take save at
this more literal meaning then other relievers should get saves, maybe instead
of holds. Really a closer doesn’t ‘save’ a game, but rather he ‘finishes’ or
‘closes’. But these words aren’t as loaded as the word save. Even a failed save
is loaded language – we call it a ‘blown save’? That sounds severe. What if we
called an ‘incomplete’? That wouldn’t sound like such a big deal.
Does this use of the
word ‘save’ make closers more overrated? Possibly to some degree but I suspect
the effect would be small. I think that even if we called them ‘closes’ or
‘finishes’ then baseball fans and players would start to attach a great
severity of meaning to those words. But it is an interesting though exercise in
how our use of words to describe things might affect our perception of these
things.