Jerome Holtzman, Famed Baseball Writer, Dies at 82

Plenty of people reading FanHouse today will likely have no idea who Jerome Holtzman is. I didn't. But for baseball fans, his is a death worth reflecting on, if only for a couple hundred words. A legendary baseball writer, he passed away today at the age of 82:

Known as "the Dean" in baseball press boxes, Holtzman chronicled the seasons of the White Sox and Cubs for more than 40 years at Chicago newspapers, beginning in 1957 at the Sun-Times. He was also responsible for the institution of the "save" rule to acknowledge effective relief pitching in 1966, the first major statistic recognized by Major League Baseball since the RBI was added in 1920.

Holtzman went on to become baseball's official statistician in 1999, a role he filled until his death. He also wrote No Cheering in the Press Box, a baseball-press retrospective. Straight from the old school, Holtzman's stuff is the kind of nostalgic pulp that gets folks like Buzz Bissinger all warm and fuzzy, but it's also soft and harmless. It's also worth nothing that the save, while widely adopted by baseball fans, isn't actually the best way of predicting a reliever's effectiveness. Frankly, it's a junk stat.

But these are minor qualms. Holtzman was a legend, a baseball-writing pioneer that helped foster the game as America's pastime. Were it not for Holtzman, plenty of baseball writers would be, I don't know, writing about football? Working for the copy desk? Holtzman's kind paved the way for baseball media of all sorts, and for that, at the very least, he will be remembered.