If we’ve read it once, we’ve read it a thousand times (or so it seems): The Cardinals lead the major leagues with 30 blown saves. For our own personal sanity, we’d like to end the inanity of writers citing this statistic once and for all.

First, any writer who still clings to the save and its uglier little brother the blown save as a means of expressing any worthwhile information about a relief pitcher or pitchers should go help Buzz Bissinger with his next book. Presumably, the blown-saves trope is an effort to express how bad a bullpen is. But several factors render it useless as a statistic, including the following, which will allow us to determine whether what is meant by that "30 blown saves" allegation — that Cardinal relievers are a bunch of chokers — is fair:

Quality of starting pitching: If a team’s starters are good, then it’s more likely that there will be more leads and ties to blow. The Cardinals’ starters have the fifth-best ERA in the league. The Mets have the third-best (remember that).

Relief-pitching changes: Since a team can "earn" more than one blown save per game, the more relievers a team deploys per game, the more chances they’ll have for their relievers to rack up the blown saves. If it feels like Tony La Russa is paid a bonus based on the number of pitching changes he makes, it’s because the Cardinals do make a lot. In fact, they use the fifth-most relievers per game, with more than three each game (and consequently, have the third-fewest batters faced by reliever per Game):

Leads bigger than three runs: The blown save measures only cough-ups in situations where a save would otherwise be earned. But why limit it that way, which would only include leads of three runs or less? Isn’t a blown five-run lead far worse than a blown one-run lead? Let’s at least tell the whole story of the number of leads that the Cardinals have surrendered: That’s 35. And yet the Cardinals do not lead the league, much less the majors, in blown leads, as the following chart shows.

Early leads: But even leads bigger than three runs isn’t a good way to look at it: How many leads and ties did they have the opportunity to blow in the first place? Something that pitchers have absolutely no control over (and one of the reasons that pitcher wins and losses are inane) is offense. Teams that tend to score earlier in the game create more leads and ties to be blown later. How do the Cardinals rank?

So that’s it, really: The Cardinals have simply brought the most leads into the seventh inning — 79 — of any NL team. And the Cardinals and Mets — two of the best starting staffs this season — are tied for the highest percentage of their games in which they’ve taken at least a tie into the seventh inning. Not surprisingly, then, even an average bullpen is going to blow a greater number of those games than, say, the Giants, whose bullpen we can reasonably assert is worse than the Cardinals’, even though they have only 16 blown saves (they have 34 blown leads), since, after all, they’ve had 20 fewer games to blow (at least from the seventh inning on).

Thankfully, fans have access to more than newsprint these days and can go to Baseball-Reference.com, for instance, to find out more pertinent stats to assess teams’ bullpens. As for people quoting the Cardinals’ 30 blown saves, just let us know. We’ll forward their names to Buzz, who appreciates that kind of uncritical, mainstream thinking.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.