In Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...

 (MLB), the 300 save club is a term applied to the group of pitcher

Pitcher

In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throwsthe baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw a walk. In the numbering system used to record defensive plays, the...

s who have recorded 300 or more regular-season saves in their careers. Most commonly a relief pitcher

Relief pitcher

A relief pitcher or reliever is a baseball or softball pitcher who enters the game after the starting pitcher is removed due to injury, ineffectiveness, fatigue, ejection, or for other strategic reasons, such as being substituted by a pinch hitter...

 ("reliever") earns a save by entering in the ninth inning of a game in which his team is winning by three or fewer runs and finishing the game by pitching one inning without losing the lead. The statistic was created by Jerome Holtzman

Jerome Holtzman

Jerome Holtzman was an American sportswriter known for his writings on baseball who served as the official historian for Major League Baseball from 1999 until his death.-Newspaper career:...

 in 1959 to "measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers" and was adopted as an official statistic by MLB in 1969.