Some pretty poor advice from a podcaster on closers and save percentages. Here is why his advice is flawed. On a podcast recently one fantasy website maven was discussing the save percentage stat. The recommendation was to only view as secure in their jobs those closers that had 90% save percentages; namely they save 90% of the opportunities. Otherwise, they are to be considered vulnerable. Some specific targets were Jose Valverde, Todd Jones and a few others.

Clearly this is lazy advice. 90% is way too high a standard and in any event save percentage should have very little to do with your evaluation of whether a closer is vulnerable or not. For reference here are the career save percentages for a few closers:

Trevor Hoffman: 89%
Mariano Rivera 88%
Lee Smith 82%
Jeff Reardon 77%
John Franco 81%
Troy Percival 86%
Tom Henke 85%

There are some obvious factors that are more important than save percentage that are not news to anyone, but just to point them out:

Skills (K rate, BB rate, Hit rate etc)–this is probably 75% of the battle right here.
Manager Usage/Opportunity–This is another 15-20% of the battle.
Left-handedness
Competition in the pen
History of Success in closer role (only because some managers prefer retreads to unknowns)

Do I think the save percentage is a factor? Well, I suppose it is in a vague sense, but I can say that I have never looked at it as a guide to whether a closer is successful or vulnerable in and of itself, and certainly I would not use some arbitrary standard that is not attained by some of the greatest closers in history. Does anyone think that Jose Valverde is vulnerable because he has blown two saves this year??

Lest you think I am foolish for looking at career totals, here are the percentages for the all time single season leaders (stats from MLB.com):

John Smoltz 2002 55 sv/59 svo–93%
Mariano Rivera 2001 50/57–87%
Mariano Rivera 2004 53/57–93%
Eric Gagne 2002 52/56–93%
Eric Gagne 2003 55/55–100%
Francisco Cordero 2004 49/54–91%
Chad Cordero 2005 47/54–87%
Jason Isringhausen 2004 47/54– 87%
Jose Mesa 2002 45/54–83%
Robb Nen 2001 45/52–87%
Kaz Sasaki 2001 45/52–87%

These are the top ten save seasons of all time. Only 5 were above the 90% standard. Going a bit further down to the top 25 all time, only 9 met the standard.

Will this advice hurt you? Probably not, unless you go and dump Jose Valverde or Mariano Rivera because they aren’t at the 90% level. That is not to say that the save percentage is irrelevant; but that stat is just a number that is not as important as looking at the overall picture.