Saves are everybody’s favorite topic, it sometimes seems to me, even though it seems obvious to me that saves are as much a function of opportunity as skill.
No, not everyone would make a good cleanup hitter, but anybody who batted fourth would drive in more runs than most anyone else who didn’t.
Similarly, not everyone would make a good closer, but anybody who was called on consistently to close games would get more saves than anyone who didn’t.
What Steve says in this article about percentage of saves per team win is of some interest. But he posts a straw man when he says that common knowledge is that bad teams get fewer saves than good teams. He very astutely points out that this chart doesn’t really address that issue in roto terms, where we don’t care so much about team saves as individual saves.
The bigger point here is that team saves definitely seem to center at about 50% of team wins, and variations don’t necessarily reflect the quality of the team.
I think the lesson is that while saves are very valuable in a mathmatical sense, which is why most of the top earning pitchers are closers, in reality saves is a very fluid market with many surprises. In spite of the earnings of closers, it is better to spend a little on saves than a lot.
The real skill (or is it luck?) is figuring out who is going to get the opportunities.