I posting this again because I've learned a bit more about what's happening. So here is my new post / question:
I have an MVC grid where I have a Save event defined as follows:
.Events(events => events.Change("gridRowChange").Edit("onEdit").Save("onSave"))
In my JavaScript code I have an onSave(e) function defined that never gets called when a grid item is saved programmatically as follows:
$("#grid").data("kendoGrid").saveRow();
However, if a row is not saved programmatically, or, in other words, when the grid itself saves the row, my Save event does get called.