Oakland A’s trivia: Saves leaders by year

The 2020 MLB season is on hiatus, and there’s no telling when baseball might start again. In the meantime, let’s play some trivia!

The save stat became official in Major League Baseball in 1969, the year after the A’s moved to Oakland. Since then, 51 seasons have been played, and every year someone has led the team in saves.

There have been long stretches with one star holding down the closer job, other times when the club went year-to-year with different rental options and/or one-year wonders, and still other times when they just weren’t very good that year and some random setup man filled in for a summer.

One point of interest here is the 1980-81 seasons, the first two under the leadership of manager Billy Martin. Oakland had winning campaigns in both years, but their saves leaders tallied only six and three, respectively. The reason for that is Martin’s (in)famous love of starting pitchers and distrust in his bullpen. A’s starters threw complete games around 60% of the time during those two years, and it’s hard for the pen to rack up saves when they rarely even enter the game at all — and especially when you consider that most of the non-complete games were probably times when the starters got hit hard and the team went on to lose, and many/most of the wins were probably games that the starters finished themselves.

The question today is, how many of Oakland’s yearly saves leaders can you name? There were no official saves in 1968, their first year in the Bay Area, so we’re starting in ‘69. I have constructed a quiz on the website Sporcle to test your knowledge, with the following instructions:

• Since saves became official, from 1969-2019
• You can go in any order, with 10 minutes and unlimited guesses to fill 51 spaces.
• You only need to type the last names to register the answers.
• However, you do have to spell them right!
• Read the next paragraph about how to not spoil the answers for everyone else in the comments section.

Share your results in the comments, BUT DON’T SPOIL ANYTHING!! There is an option in the comments for ”spoiler text,” which will black out that particular text until the reader puts their mouse over it to reveal it. If you are going to share right/wrong answers, please use the spoiler option. It’s on the row of options like bold, italics, etc., all the way on the right side, in between the option to add a hyperlink and the option to add a smiley face; it looks like a black square.

DON’T BE THAT PERSON WHO SPOILS THE ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS.

Alrighty, here is the quiz! It’s embedded below, or you can click here to play it on Sporcle’s site.

How did you do? Are there any that you can’t believe you missed?