Nate Silver proposes the Goose Egg* to replace the save:

*Silver does not capitalize it, but should to make it look more important.

Building on the work of Baseball Prospectus’s Russell Carleton,2 I’ve designed a statistic and named it the goose egg to honor (or troll) Gossage. The basic idea — aside from some additional provisions designed to handle inherited runners, which we’ll detail later — is that a pitcher gets a goose egg for a clutch, scoreless relief inning. Specifically, he gets credit for throwing a scoreless inning when it’s the seventh inning or later and the game is tied or his team leads by no more than two runs. A pitcher can get more than one goose egg in a game, so pitching three clutch scoreless innings counts three times as much as one inning does.

The goose egg properly rewards the contributions made by Gossage and other “firemen” of his era, who regularly threw two or three innings at a time, often came into the game with runners on base, and routinely pitched in tie games and not just in save situations.3 I’ve calculated goose eggs for all seasons since 19304 — plus select seasons since 1921 — based on play-by-play data from Retrosheet. While Gossage ranks only 23rd in major league history with 310 saves, he’s the lifetime leader in goose eggs (677) — ahead of Rivera and every other modern closer.

It’s a very good idea. One thing that Silver does not touch on, it’s not so much that managers want to use closers to maximize their saves, the closers want to be used to maximize their saves, since that right now is the measure of their performance. Someone needs to persuade relievers that the Goose Egg is the better stat, and relief use will change to maximize that measure.