Hall of Fame sports writer Jerome Holtzman, inventor of the save, dies in Chicago

Jerome Holtzman never played big-league baseball. But few made a bigger mark on the game than the legendary sports writer, who died over the weekend in Chicago at age 81.

"It's a sad day for everybody in baseball," Commissioner Bud Selig told the Chicago Tribune. "Jerome was a Hall of Famer in everything he did, in every sense of the word."

He covered the White Sox and Cubs for the better part of four decades for the Chicago Sun-Times, and then for the Tribune. He was a columnist for the Sporting News for 30 seasons, and at one point appeared in 1,000 consecutive issues. He also wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on baseball.

And relief pitchers forever will owe him a debt of gratitude. In 1959 Holtzman invented the save, which measures the effectiveness of a relief pitcher. It became an official statistic recognized by Major League Baseball a decade later.

"The reality is, he revolutionized baseball," former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Gleason told the Tribune. "He glamorized the relief pitcher, who was just another guy before [the save rule]. Jerome said not long ago that he was sorry he'd come up with the concept, that it wasn't necessary. But there was no need to apologize. If there were more people who thought like Jerome Holtzman, the newspaper business would be in better shape."