Papelbon - 1.61 ERA, 75 K/15 walks, .77 WHIP Dempster - 3.88 ERA, 48K/27 walks, 1.28 WHIP. But hey, at least his performance in situations arbitrarily defined by a meaningless statistic is only marginally worse than Papelbons! (Also, let's not mention the two tie games he entered and singlehandedly let get out of reach) Excellent points made comparing Dempster to a real closer. Saves are a meaningless statistic For the 2006 and 2007 seasons combined Dempster's ERA is close to 4.50. That's horrible for a so-called closer. So you'll stack up his pretty bad 2006 season with his decent 2007 season, but totally leave out his excellent 2005 season? How does that work?