Collette Calls: Everyone Gets A Save!

The advice offered by fantasy pundits concerning drafting closers ranges from the aggressive to absurd every season. There are those who refuse to spend on saves and will just pick things up in the very end game while there are others who firmly believe you have to get at least one horse to hitch your saves wagon to. The NFBC leagues skew things a bit because you must draft for balance in that format, but the saves category continues to be the least enjoyable one in the game because of the volatility related to relief pitchers. 

Historically, we always see many pitchers picking up saves as the number has never been below 120 pitchers during the wild card era. Prior to Covid, we had a seven-year trend of increasing number of pitchers with at least one save in a given season:

This year, especially the last few weeks with the residual effects of the trade deadline, things feel more like this:

Cincinnati has already utilized 10 pitchers in save situations this season, which has paced the league. Some of that has been due to the injuries throughout their bullpen, but some of that has been to cover for ineffectiveness as well. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Pittsburgh who has used only the since-traded Richard Rodriguez and Chris Stratton for saves this season:

This distribution of saves due to injury, ineffectiveness or relocation has led to some interesting results for closers this season. Before showing specific player breakdown, it is worth noting where the 798 league-wide saves have gone by ADP this season:

• Closers drafted in the top 100 have accounted for 21 percent of those saves
• Closers drafted in the top 200 have accounted for 35 percent of those saves
• Closers drafted in the top 300 have accounted for 50 percent of those saves
• Closers drafted in the top 400 have accounted for 69 percent of those saves

Recall that in a standard online championship format on NFBC, there are only 360 players taken. A review of the data shows that 36 percent of the saves have gone to pitchers taken after pick 360 and 29 percent of saves from pitchers taken after pick 450 (15tm format) based on ADP from 10/1/20-3/28/21.

The Top 100:

This group has mostly been worth the investment even if two are currently on the injured list. Karinchak is the clear loser here as he ended up in a job-sharing situation with Emmanuel Clase.

101-200

Alex Colome had enough red flags prior to the season to scare many away, and those problems did not take long to surface this season. Barnes ended up surviving the noise about who was going to get the closer role in Boston and has done extremely well with the job this season. Hand has performed decently as the closer, but he did not come cheap. Kimbrel has had a wonderful rebound season even though his opportunities will now be fewer while Rodriguez closed for an awful team that provided him few opportunities. He may steal some from Smith now that the two are teammates in Atlanta.

201-300

This is where the real fun began as McGee and Melancon were mostly afterthoughts for saves with the attention going to Tyler Rogers and Drew Pomeranz or Emilio Pagan, and yet these two late-round vets have been tremendous values for those who waited on saves. Even Bard has managed to save 18 games for a terrible Colorado club. Conversely, the speculations on the shaky skills from Holland and Garrett's inexperience did not pay off.

301-360

Reyes has gone down the Shawn Chacon route for his 25 saves this season, but he was truly an afterthought on draft day and has delivered the saves. Kennedy was buried in the Texas bullpen preseason, but injuries gave way to his experience, and now he has the job in Philadelphia after the trade. We now have five relievers taken after pick 240 with 18-plus saves, which translates to them going after the 20th round in 12 team leagues. Most of the pitchers in this group would have been reserve picks by ADP.

361-450

No pitcher in this grouping was the favorite to close, but they have each turned into decent spec plays for saves very late in the game with Trivino making the most of a wide-open opportunity in Oakland once Trevor Rosenthal was ruled out for the season. Graveman took advantage of the injuries in Seattle to take the job before being surprisingly sent away to Houston to give Ryan Pressly some help.

450 or Higher

I sorted this table differently and also cut off those relievers with fewer than three saves. Robles is the only reliever with double-digit saves who would have been a free-agent pickup in 15-team leagues. Otherwise, those teams would have had to effort to stream saves from this group of castoffs and afterthoughts all season. Some of these guys, such as Floro and Finnegan, have only recently come into the role on the club while many of these names had the role early in the season but have since lost it.

Saves continue to be a frustrating part of fantasy baseball, and those who advocate for paying for saves as well as those who advocate for waiting on them can look at this data and claim victory in one form or another. Fifty-eight percent of pitchers with a save this season — 87 of 150 — have fewer than three saves. We cannot count on that player pool to move the needle much outside of the anecdote where a final day save from Anthony Bass once won Glenn Colton and Rick Wolf the AL LABR league years ago. Saves feel like they're everywhere these days, but they are just more widely distributed and we can only wait so long to speculate on saves.