ALL_THE_HYPE said:DaveH said:braden said:[quote="ALL_THE_HYPE":2fqa8aq4]
I just lost some respect for Baseball America.
People who try to say that unearned runs are the pitchers fault don't know baseball whatsoever.
Not so fast. Unearned runs can come in any number of ways and can tell you things about a pitcher. I think it was Prospectus that did an interesting study a couple of years ago showing that pitchers who gave up a large number of UER one year suffered from highers ERAs the next.
Take these two scenarios for example:
1- Bases loaded, two out. Fly ball. Dropped. 3 runs score. All unearned. Next batter retired.
2- Nobody on, two out. Fly ball. Dropped. Runner reaches second. Next five batters reach base. Three runs score. All unearned.
You can't tell me both scenarios are the same. The pitcher in scenario 2 fared much worse yet still comes out unscathed.
yep. this is because ERA is an outdated metric... still valuable, but not completely "indicative of how good a pitcher is at doing his job" as All the Hype is suggesting
I did not say that ERA is completely indicative of how good a pitcher is...but I will stand by the ERA statistic as the best stat available (that the average baseball fan easily recognizes) to show how well a pitcher keeps the other team from scoring runs.
What stat is better?[/quote:2fqa8aq4]
as braden already posted. FIP is better... its not perfect, but its better.