Bobby Thigpen

By Brendon Rosenau
Love of Sports Correspondent

We’re going to start today’s Old School Love with a trivia question.

For hardcore baseball fans this is a big, fat juicy meatball down the heart of the plate. For others, this is as puzzling as Mike Mussina pitching to Manny last week.

OK … who holds the major league single-season record for saves?

Interesting question, isn’t it? Think of all the great relief pitchers that have played this game. The Goose, Rollie Fingers, Bruce Sutter, Mo Rivera, Lee Smith, Dennis Eckersley and the king of saves, Trevor Hoffman, just to name a few.

Surprisingly, none of them are the right answer.

Let’s take a quick trip back to 1990. This was the year the Oakland A’s won 100 games, Cecil Fielder was slugging 50 home runs, Roger Clemens was tossed out of a playoff game and the Cincinnati Reds were World Champs.

That season also marked a change in the role of the closer. No longer was the team’s best relief pitcher coming in during the seventh or eighth innings. Rather, it was in the ninth for the one inning save.

Tony La Russa is given credit for shortening ball games by requiring starters to only go six or seven innings before turning the game over to a horde of relieves. Of course, that’s easy to do when you have a Hall of Famer like Eckersley on your roster to end the game for you.

However, the dominant closer title in that year would go to another right hander. This one played on the South Side of Chicago.

Bobby Thigpen. Remember him?

Thigpen saved a record 57 games that season, leading the White Sox to a 94-68 record and a second-place finish in the A.L. West. He was the first pitcher to record more than 50 in a year, destroying the previous record of 46, held by Eckersley.

Since that time, nine others have notched 50 saves, the most recent being Mariano Rivera saving 53 games in 2004.

Thigpen was brilliant in 1990, as he made 77 appearances and pitched 88.2 innings. He carried an ERA of 1.83 and struck out 70 batters. Eleven of his saves were more than an inning long, which showed that the while the new way of the save was on the horizon, Thigpen was still a bit of a throwback as well.

That season would be the best of Thigpen’s career, as he made his only All-Star Game, finished fourth in the Cy Young voting and fifth in the MVP. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t remain an elite closer.

Thigpen had saved 34 games in ’88 and ‘89 and notched 30 in ’91, but would be limited by a back injury. In 1993, he was traded to the Phillies for journeyman Jose DeLeon and made four playoff appearances for them. In the ’93 World Series, he pitched in two games and didn’t allow a run in 2.2 innings.

Thigpen was released by the Phils after that year and signed with Seattle, but pitched only seven games before injuries ended his career.

Thigpen was also a member of the famed Mississippi State team in 1985 that featured future big leaguers Will Clark, Rafael Palmeiro and Jeff Brantley.

Today, we give the all-time single-season saves leader some Old School Love. We hope he’s out there somewhere saving a copy of this.