Francisco Rodriguez on pace to crush the saves record.

Yesterday with against the Minnesota Twins, Francisco Rodriguez notched his 50th save of the season, and it's still August!

He reached the magic 50 with the Angels having only complete 129 games. That's the fastest ever. Secondplace, Eric Gagne reached 50 after the Dodgers completed 143 games.

He is now on pace to crush the single season saves record held by Bobby Thigpin (57 saves). K-rod is on pace to have 62.7 saves, to be exact. Yet, K-rod is far from being one of the greatest closers of all time.

This season K-rod's whip has been a worst ever 1.27 and far from the closer ideal of sub-1.0. He is also only averaging 1.12 strikeouts/inning, his worst since his rookie season 1.10. K-rod is also on pace to give up the most walks of his short career...

By comparison, in 2003 when Eric Gagne saved his NL record 55 games, Gagne had a whip of 0.69, and averaged 1.66 strikeouts/inning.

So if K-rod is having one of his worst pitching seasons of his career, why is he about the stand alone atop the single-season-save rankings?

The Angels are rollin', and the its starting pitchers routinely set up the game perfectly for K-rod.

Lost in the mix is the fact that already K-rod has entered 61 games. He is on pace to enter 76.6 games, again the most of his career.

Still, with all of this, K-rod has been able to save 82% of the games he has entered. Gagne by comparison saved only 71.4% in that historic 2003 season.

Gagne, however had ZERO blown saves in 03, while K-rod already has 5. That equates to a 10% failure rate. He better clean that up by the playoffs, otherwise it'll be a nerve-racking 9th inning for Angel's fans.

Side note: don't you love how Baseball articles almost always turn into stat fest??? I sure do!