Only three career-long closing pitchers have been inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame: Rollie Fingers, Rich Gossage, and Bruce Sutter.
Point being, it ain't easy to be a fireman.
Save for one notable exception, we haven't seen any Gossages or Sutters over the last couple of decades, but there have been plenty of terrific closers. Who was the best? We'll use FanGraphs' numbers to answer that question.
Fangraphs' wins above replacement (WAR) is the overall measure by which we selected and ranked the top 15 relievers of recent years. WAR, for the uninitiated, t's a popular baseball metric which summarizes a player's total contributions to their team.