Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,951

This is the grave of Jerome Holtzman.

Born in 1926 in Chicago, Holtzman would be a very Chicago guy for his whole life. He grew up very poor. His father died when he was 10 and his mother couldn’t support the kids. He went into an orphanage, which at the time was not so uncommon when parents simply couldn’t support the kids. It wasn’t always a permanent thing. But he was really poor. So he had to work. He later claimed that he loved his time in the orphanage, which says a lot about his home life I imagine. He got a job at the Chicago Daily News in 1943, working as a copyboy. World War II came and he was in the Marines for two years. Upon returning, he went back to the paper.

Holtzman became the dean of sports reporters. He was often referred to as “the dean” as a matter of fact. He reported in over 1,000 consecutive issues of The Sporting News, spanning over 30 years. He was something of a seer. He saw the inevitably of a strong players’ union and wrote about it extensively. That said, he was pretty routinely on the owners’ side in these disputes, especially in the 1994 strike. It was said that no one got into the Hall of Fame unless Holtzman approved. Not sure how true that is, but it gives a sense of the kind of power people thought he had. He wrote a lot of baseball books as well. Baseball Chicago Style was a history of the Cubs and White Sox, i.e,, a history of losing. No Cheering in the Press Box was his interviews with other baseball reporters and that’s the one I probably should read.

In 1959, Holtzman invented the save as a statistic. Whether it’s a super useful stat to decide who the best relief pitchers are is up for debate. Some teams have finally moved away from it. But from the 1980s-2010s, it was seen as a premier stat and you wanted your baddest reliever to close games for you, such as Mariano Rivera or Dennis Eckersley. Major League Baseball began recognizing it as an official statistic in 1969, which was the first time it had added a new official stat since the RBI in 1920. And while you can argue that the save is overrated if you want to, it was the first time anyone had ever tried to create a measurement for relief pitchers, traditionally the most forgotten members of a baseball team. As the librarian of the HOF said in Holtzman’s Times obit:

“He had a career that spanned several generations of players. So he was able to make very valuable cross-comparisons. He used the pulpit he had to push for a statistic by which relievers could be compared, and where would we be without that stat?”

Makes sense to me.

Holtzman came to define the look of a sportswriter. Big guy, suspenders, cigar constantly in his mouth. Unsurprisingly, he was elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1989. He retired himself in 1999 was Major League Baseball named him their official historian. It didn’t mean much, just a nice honor. He did write occasionally for the rest of his life.

Holtzman died in 2008. He was 82. It was a stroke that felled him.

Jerome Holtzman is buried in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other baseball reporters in the HOF as we hit the rare September when my Seattle Mariners actually look very likely to make the playoffs, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bus Saidt is in Trenton, New Jersey and Bob Hunter is in Hollywood. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.