Being a closer is overrated. The save is a term created in 1959 by a long-ago Chicago baseball writer named Jerome Holtzman. Baseball adopted it in ’69, much to the delight of player agents, who used it to inflate their clients’ salaries.
When you can walk into a game with the bases empty, holding a 3-run lead, and you get a couple outs, that’s not a save. That’s a short night’s work.
Most of the time.
This month, Amir Garrett has turned a short night’s work into a long day’s journey into night.