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Monday, April 12, 2004

Get rid of Earned Runs?

Another interesting article on Baseball Prospectus on Earned Run Average. Basically, the author argues for getting rid of the difference between earned and unearned runs and simply calling Run Average (RA). I agree that preventing unearned runs is indeed a skill in as much as good pitchers will tend to give up fewer simply because they are good pitchers and giving up unearned runs comes with the territory for some pitchers such as the knuckleballers he mentions. However, I do think that calculating ERA as it's construed is useful since some pitchers can be victimized by horrible defense. A more pressing problem I see lies with the poor scoring of errors that happens so often. I would be for making the official scorer a trained MLB representative to give some impartiality and consistency to the process.

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