Eighth in a new series
As a matter of policy for this series, I have chosen not to profile MLB colleagues, current and former, but Jerome Holtzman is the notable exception. His long career opened the door for me to succeed him, three years after his death, as MLB’s historian.
But he had gone out of his way to befriend me much earlier — in 1993, when he took me to Comiskey Park, Studs Terkel’s studio, and the original Billy Goat Tavern. In later years, as his publisher, I returned the compliment. Jerry was a great man and a good friend, with a backstory even more compelling than his 1960 invention of the Save, or his 1974 publication of No Cheering in the Press Box (a classic), or his 1999 appointment as MLB’s first official historian.
Let’s talk first about those accomplishments most often cited. At age 17, he had moved up from copyboy at the Chicago Daily Times in 1943 to, after two years in the Marines, its high-school sports reporter; then he began covering the Cubs and White Sox for the Sun-Times; and then he moved on to the Tribune. He wrote a weekly column for The Sporting News for two decades, appearing in 1,000 consecutive issues. He wrote books along the way, too — even trying his hand, in 1980, at publishing a ten-volume line of autographed “Holtzman Sports Classics” that sold poorly (though I have a set), filling a closet in his Evanston home.
Jerry was a picturesque fellow, too, with his suspenders, his stogie and, in Bruce Weber’s phrase from his New York Times obituary, “eyebrows as furry as Chia pets” (which he is said to have trimmed for his 1989 Hall of Fame “induction,” but I can’t imagine that to be so). After twenty years in the business, Jerry became Jerome, thinking it would better reflect his widely acknowledged stature as the dean of the press box.
His invariable roommate on trips to New York to cover one Chicago team or the other was former catcher Moe Berg, baseball’s brainiest man ever. As Ira Berkow reported Holtzman to say, “Moe knew my schedule … we always went to the ballpark together and came back together. He’d sit next to me in the press box. I was delighted. I didn’t want to stay three days alone. So if they hadn’t given me a room with twin beds, I’d change rooms. We’d lie awake at night, and he’d tell me stories….”
Berg played in the 1920s, when the game’s first great reliever, Fred “Firpo” Marberry, complained that “if the relief pitcher holds the opposing club in check, he gets no credit. The pitcher who preceded him and couldn’t stand the pace wins the game.” As the decades progressed, a little-noticed trend was taking shape: fewer complete games, and more clubs employing relief specialists. From 1876 to 1904, 90.5 per cent of all games were finished by the pitchers who had started them. In 1924 to 1946, that figure was nearly halved (45.9), in then in 1959 to 1978, nearly halved again (25.7). By 2007, the year before Jerry’s death, the percentage of games completed by the starter had nosedived to 2.3 per cent.
Holtzman recognized in 1959, when he was still with the Sun-Times, that something dramatic was happening on the field that was invisible in the box score and, by extension, at the bargaining table when relievers came to negotiate their salaries for the next season. As he told Darrell Horwitz in an interview in 2005: “Elroy Face was 18–1 with Pittsburgh in 1959. I was traveling with the Cubs. The Cubs had two relief pitchers: righthander Don Elston and lefthander Bill Henry. They were constantly protecting leads and no one even knew about it.” It burned him that Face was piling up wins by blowing victories and then having the Pirates rally for him; ten times Face had allowed the tying or lead run.
He came up with The Save. The Sporting News began listing league leaders during the 1960 season; by 1969 it was an official MLB stat. In 1974–1975 its definition came under further modification, but there is no denying the impact of Holtzman’s invention. (For baseball that word is tricky, with its echoes of Abner Doubleday; in 1924 Pat McDonough developed a similar stat which he called “games finished by relief hurlers.” Three years later the stat appeared in the New York Telegram.)
In 1974, following the lead of Larry Ritter’s 1966 oral history The Glory of Their Times, Jerry gathered up 18 interviews with pioneering baseball scribes and published No Cheering in the Press Box, which I admire beyond reason. Dan Daniel, John Kieran, Marshall Hunt, John R. Tunis, Shirley Povich, Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Paul Gallico — these were some of the notable writers of that time whose acute and pungent recall gave that book its spice. I included in my first Armchair Book of Baseball (1985) Jerry’s splendid session with Richards Vidmer, who covered the Yanks in the 1920s and ’30s.
Jerry said: “I remember Jimmy Cannon telling me, ‘A sportswriter is entombed in a prolonged boyhood,’ because we’re always writing about youth, the athletes. But I also remember Shirley Povich saying that when he was young, all the players were heroes, but it seemed he matured overnight, and stopped writing about the roar of the crowd. I know what he meant.”
I noted above that Holtzman had joined the Chicago Times in 1943 but I have saved the best for last. He had come to the paper after seven years at an orphanage, custodians for about 300 kids, evenly divided between boys and girls. On the West Side of Chicago, it was called the Marks Nathan Jewish Orphan Home.
His father, Sam, died in 1936, when Jerry was 10. His mother, Dorothy, was unable to keep him, or his older sister Helen, or his younger brother Carl, both of whom joined Jerry at the orphanage. He worked on the high-school paper and, he said, discovered he had “a modest flair for writing.” When he left the orphanage, they gave him a suit and $10.
“I thought it was terrific,” Holtzman told the New York Times in a 1990 interview. “The building was about a half-block square, and there was a ball field beside it, and we had ice cream every Friday night. My wife, Marilyn, says there has to be something wrong with someone who likes an orphanage.”
PIONEERS: Jerome Holtzman was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.