Quote:
Originally Posted by Mariner and Giants Fan
Actually, it makes perfect sense. as the pitcher's ERA is a measure of his pitching performance, not his defensive skills. Think about it. Should a player's batting average also be impacted by his defensive stats?
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For me, ERA measures a pitcher's (defensive) performance, how many runs he does allow in 9 innings. Excluding errors makes sense, as those are usually not his fault.
However, when you give a pitcher the ball you also have to accept his fielding. You cannot pinch-field for the pitcher, so his whole performance in getting outs is not 100% pitching, it is 99% pitching and 1% fielding. I know there are more complicated statistics that will include his fielding, but I like the simplicity of ERA. "This is how many allowed runs you can expect with this pitcher on the mound, if his teammates do not let him down."
Letting him off the hook for his own errors makes no sense for me. If a batter reaches on an E1 and comes around to score, that run is given up by the man on the mound. Another pitcher, given the definition of error, would likely not allow the same guy to reach and score. The performance of a pitcher allowing a runner to reach first on an E1 and on a single is in game terms exactly identical, so the main performance stat ERA should reflect that as well and only let a pitcher get unearned runs if it wasn't the pitchers fault those runs scored.