In baseball, a save is credited to the pitcher who finishes a game for the winning team under certain conditions, for example with a lead of three runs or fewer. The sportswriter Jerome Holtzman lobbied for the statistic in 1959. It became official in 1969, the first new official statistic since 1920.
The save created a role, the closer, a pitcher who comes in to finish games. The writer Bradford Doolittle called it “the only example in sports of a statistic creating a job.”