Overview
A hold is credited to a middle reliever who enters in a save situation (lead of 3 runs or fewer, tie game, or tying run on base), maintains the lead, and exits before the game ends. NPB officially adopted the hold as a statistic in 2005, providing a way to quantify middle reliever contributions that were previously invisible in win and save totals. The metric is directly tied to evaluating setup men who handle the seventh and eighth innings in the 'winning pattern,' and carries significant weight in salary negotiations. Naoki Miyanishi (Nippon-Ham) set the career record by surpassing 300 holds in 2023, the first player in NPB history to reach that milestone. The single-season record belongs to Tetsuya Yamaguchi (Yomiuri) with 46 hold points in 2012. In recent years, 'hold points' (holds plus relief wins) have become the standard, with the Best Middle Reliever title determined by this combined metric.