Bullpen Report: Hold On For One More Day

Some day somebody’s gonna make you want to turn around and say goodbye.  Until then baby, are you going to let them hold you down and make you cry? Don’t you know?  Don’t you know things can change, things’ll go your way, if you hold on for one more day.  

That music of genius was brought on by a smooth impromptu karaoke session in a West Boston saloon.  It was me and Ralph and a girl who was paid by the dollar to talk to us about her kid.  It’s all a true story.  Fun times were had, and at the time I didn’t realize how correlative the song was back then to this particular stat category and one that is by far my favorite to talk about.  Funny, it only took a Wilson Phillips song on the drive home from work to reminisce about Boston, Ralph, and relief pitching.  I love the stat, not everyone uses it, but I still love it nonetheless. If your leagues uses it, cool, well I will be your every other week destination for giving you the low-down on the hold situations going across the MLB.  So get comfy, with a week to go until Spring Training starts, and the full extent of the 2017 season yet to play.  You will get sick of me, in say… 30 weeks.  So get comfy on your favorite porcelain fantasy reading chair and welcome to a brand new year!

The stat is basically evolving as a usage thing in real life baseball.  So that means from the standpoint of fantasy that the abundance of the stat is still there.  The only bad relationship between the stat now and say 2007 is that the percentage of save chances (which are holds chances with fancy words) and there relative conversion are basically holding steady at a 52-54% conversion of all chances.  Now for the good thing, in that same ten year period the amount of chances has increased by over 250, from 2198 in 2007 to 4454 in 2017.  More of them, just more diversified. The hold game, and the save game for that matter has become a specialized mechanism for a good team.  A strategic building tool for the middle teams, and a place to get the youth of baseball america some reps for the rebuilding ones.  To put it simply, more often then not then better teams have the goods and that is where you should invest your draft attention.  Having a great closer is a good thing to because building that bridge to the other side takes confidence in between.  So with that I made a Closer Chart about a week or so ago and it will be updated next week with new signings, things I am noticing and so on.  So I figured I would make the same for the Holds variety.

American League

*denotes team in a closer by committee

National League

*denotes team in a closer by committee