Jerome Holtzman

Jerome Holtzman was born in Chicago on July 12, 1926, and grew up partly in a Jewish orphanage on the city's west side after his father died. He started at the Chicago Daily News as a copyboy in 1943, at seventeen, and apart from a stint in the Marines he stayed in Chicago newspapers for the next fifty-six years. The Daily News merged with the Sun; he moved with it to the Sun-Times and covered baseball there until 1981, then crossed the street to the Chicago Tribune, where he wrote until 1999.

That is an unusually stable career for a beat writer, and it made him the institutional memory of two ballparks. He knew every Cubs and White Sox roster back to the war, and he kept the files to prove it.

In 1959 Holtzman was bothered that relief pitchers had no way to be measured except by wins and losses, which they rarely earned, and by earned run average, which did not describe their job. He drew up a rule for crediting a reliever who protected a lead, and The Sporting News began publishing the results. Major League Baseball adopted the save as an official statistic for the 1969 season. It was the first new official stat since the run batted in, which had been added in 1920.

The first new official baseball statistic in half a century, drawn up by a beat writer.

The rule has been rewritten since and the category has been argued over ever since, mostly by people who think it pays closers too well. Holtzman took the argument in stride. He had wanted relievers to be seen; he got his wish, and then some.

His most durable book is an oral history. For No Cheering in the Press Box, published in 1974 and expanded in 1995, Holtzman sat down with the old sportswriters of the first half of the century, men like Paul Gallico, Red Smith and Shirley Povich, and let them talk about how the trade had worked. It remains the standard first reading for anyone curious about the pre-television press box, and its title has become the shorthand for the ethic it describes.

He also wrote The Commissioners, a history of the office, and Baseball, Chicago Style, along with a shelf of annuals and anthologies. The columnist Lewis Grizzard once called him the dean of American baseball writers and said no player got into Cooperstown if Holtzman did not want him there, which overstated his power but not his reputation among Hall of Fame voters.

The baseball writers gave him the J. G. Taylor Spink Award in 1991, which put his name on the wall at Cooperstown. The Associated Press Sports Editors followed with the Red Smith Award in 1997. In 1999, when he left the Tribune, Commissioner Bud Selig made him the first official historian of Major League Baseball, a job that consisted largely of answering questions nobody else could.

Holtzman died in Evanston, Illinois, on July 19, 2008, a week after his eighty-second birthday. He was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in 2004 and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2005. The cigar, the suspenders and the bushy eyebrows went with him; the save stayed in the box score.