Is it just me, or has the average .ERA of a starting pitcher gone up?

I seem to remember when I was watching baseball as a kid that the .ERAs were lower. Now the Twins have a starting pitcher with a 4.70 ERA which seems awfully high.

AM I remembering things incorrectly or is something else going on?

:shrug: :hi:

I seem to remember a lot of .ERAs in the .100 to .200 range. and someone with a .470 was rare.

I dont watch football, so I wouldnt know

:woohoo: :hi:

BASEBALL Parche, Baseball...

I think, and I hope to be corrected if wrong, starters don't pitch as long as they did in the 80's on average.

Plus, many of the same sized parks, bigger/stronger hitters.

as I was reading your post the announcers here announcing for the Twins were saying that the Pitchers dont spend as much time in the game nowadays.

That is not good, it makes the higher numbers even worse.

I do think there is something to be said for the big hitters, but I dont know if it would be that statistically significant because there are not a lot of them.

Also, the stadium size does not make a difference either because any hit counts against the .ERA

That's why I am 100% convinced that there is one baseball record that will never, ever, EVER be broken - Cy Young's record 511 career wins. Nobody will ever beat that. I doubt anybody will ever even break 400 wins again. Pitchers just don't need to work the same way they did back when the game of baseball was still young.

Back then, pitchers would start every other day or every third day. They'd usually pitch more than 7 innings, unless they really had a bad outing. There wasn't really any such thing as a set-up man, and nothing we would think of as a closer these days. It was pretty much the starting pitcher on his own.

There's another pitching record that I don't think will ever be broken, but it's only because it's an immensely negative one - 48 losses in a season. No manager who cared anything about his job would let a major league pitcher get close to half of that number before the guy got knocked down to the minors.

Complete Games for one -- 41 in one season (this is not the all-time record, but the most in any one season this century is nine) ... he also had 749 in his career. Only Nolan Ryan and Don Sutton have even started more games than he pitched all the way through.

I also think it unlikely that anybody ever top his 316 career losses ... you have to be very good these days to get to 200 losses :)

Not every club used it that far back, though. The stories of guys pitching every day or every other day are mostly from the 1800s, like Hoss Radbourne — though there was that time Grover Cleveland Alexander was pitching for the Cubs (which would put it somewhere between 1918 and 1926). He won the first game of a doubleheader, but it must've gone long or started late, because the Cubs were close to missing their train out of town. Alexander volunteered to pitch the second game, and won it on a shutout in 58 minutes.

The thing was back then, when a pitcher started a game, he was expected to finish it. Completing eight of 10 starts was normal through the '30s or so, and even into the '70s pitchers generally finished half their starts.

The one game in major league history I'd most like to have seen was when Marichal and Spahn hooked up on July 2, 1963 at Candlestick. Nobody scored until Mays homered in the bottom of the 16th. Both pitchers were still in the game — and Spahn was 42 at the time.

In. fucking. credible.

The big cookie cutters like the Vet, Three Rivers, Busch, Olympic, and Riverfront are gone, and now we have smaller Fenway/Wrigley wannabes like Camden Yards and Telecom Conglomerate To Be Named Later Park in San Francisco

I swear, lack of steroid use is just going to ruin baseball... :P

:rofl:

:hide:

I don't do sports, so I know very few names. :P

I'm pretty sure scoring is up since the 80s ...

and they're throwing all his stats around. A 1.12 season ERA in 67 or 68. So it really seems like like it to me...

:hi:

aka "The Year of the Pitcher."

Gibson also pitched 304 2/3 innings that year, completed 28 games with 13 shutouts and struck out 268.

But, hey — the Cardinals' team ERA that year was 2.49, and the National League's was 2.99.

The next year, baseball lowered the mound from 15 to 10 inches to give hitters more of an advantage.

x(

Bob Gibson remembers.

Mclain - 31 wins
Lolich - 3 world series wins

Used to be, if you were considering a PCL pitcher who'd just been called up, you subtracted one run from his ERA to put it in perspective. All the PCL's high-altitude cities made its yards into bandboxes — even Phoenix Muni, which was, I think, 420 to center... or 430.

That ended sometime in the '80s as bats with bigger sweet spots and better performance-enhancing substances came on the scene. Now, if a pitcher goes at least six innings and gives up three earned runs or less, he's credited with a "quality start." Three runs in six innings is an ERA of 4.50. What fucking "quality"?

Here're the Dodgers starters' ERAs:

Lowe — 3.90 (Includes today's game)
Penny — 5.88
Billingsley — 3.54
Kuroda — 4.04
Kershaw — 3.75

Total — 4.37

x(

Dog, but I do love me a 2-1 ball game. :(

6 to 1 game right now.

Fortunately, the '6' was next to "Dodgers." :bounce:



I can't reMEMber the last time we won two straight. So it was against Cincinnati; I'll take it. :D

2 straight.

Again.

x(

You can afford it. :P

bite your tongue!!! That's s'posed to be a secret and here you go, spillin' the beans by intimating that...

whoops...I almost said it.

Shhhhhhhhh....

Playing .625 ball with a 3 1/2 game lead over Saint Looey and 6 1/2 over the Boozers?



That secret? :shrug:

beat you now?

:spank::spank::spank:

twins over the nationals

ERA = (ER * 9 innings)/# of innings actually pitched.

:P

Did you see the Twins game last night? I got distracted in the 8th when the score was 11 to 1 Twins. Did it end higher?

Final was 11-2 I believe.

We were WAY busy yesterday, it was the last day of school for the wee one, she had swim team practice, a Brownie event and we went out to dinner.

I am doing nothing today.

to allow each team to have 10-11 quality major-league pitchers.

Usually, after an expansion, it will take several years for the quality of pitchers to catch up with the number of hitters - it's no coincidence that Roger Maris hit 61 homers in a year where the American League expanded by two teams. Similarly, George Foster hit 52 homers in 1977 - the first 50+ homer season since 1965 -when there was another expansion.

And, the explosion of home runs over the last 15 years isn't all steroid-related. It is also because of the expansion in 1993 and then in 1998. The pitching may be tapped out worldwide now. Pitchers that should be in AAA or college are now pitching in the majors.

I bet there is something to that.

The premise must demand that there's a finite number of major league-quality players, not just pitchers. :shrug:

Maris went from 39 homers in 1960 to 61 in '61 and back to 33 in '62. He never again hit even 30 in a season (even given that his only full season after '62 was in 1964, when he hit 26 homers). I'd call his '61 season too flukey to chalk it up to just expansion. Hell, in a career that lasted 12 seasons, the guy hit 22 percent of his homers in that one year.

The AL added eight games to its season that year and Maris homered approximately once every 2.5 games. Throwing in a random factor of 2x to represent the greater likelihood of him homering off the "new" pitchers, that'd give him an additional seven homers — a bit shy of 22.

Since I'm a geek and all, I'd love to research the hell out of this by checking the Yankees' game logs for '61 to see who did give up homers to him and then checking their stats (the only one I know is the one everybody knows: Tracy Stallard), but that'd take awhile.

has always been a lot easier than finding good pitchers. There are probably hundreds of guys in the minors and in college that can hit at a major league level, but just need some polishing and/or maturity.

However, finding people that can throw the ball over the plate consistently and with a good velocity is a lot harder - and, then throwing it with some movement, and then developing a curve and/or a slider and/or a change...

The best pitchers are still putting up good numbers, but they're scattered over more teams than they were in 1990 or 1992.

If it were the case, most guys in the minors would hit .360. Anyway, there's finding guys with raw talent and then there's finding guys who can learn and improve. I've seen a ton of minor league ball, and I can tell you that the latter is more rare than the former.

Seems like Jeff Nelson is always my example in this. He came up with nothing but heat, which you'd expect to find in a guy 6' 7", and his A-ball numbers were crap. But the Mariners organization saw something in him (his speed, no doubt) and nurtured him until he learned control and a slider and turned into one of the best middle relievers of his era. (Or maybe he learned that stuff when they traded him to New York; I dunno.)

I'll accept that there are guys in college and the low minors who can hit a ball as far as most major leaguers, but all things are pretty much equal throughout baseball's talent hierarchy. The lower you go, you find fewer guys who can hit, say, the good curve ball because you find fewer guys who can throw the good curve ball. The ones who make it are those who learn those skills. Some learn faster than others, so they go up more quickly, but eventually it more or less evens out, except for a relatively low percentage of true all-stars.

4.57 with the Cubs. Oakland took a chance on him and he went on a tear that would take him to the Hall of Fame, but I digress.

Nowadays, an ERA of 4.57 is nothing to worry about, but back then - mid 80's - it was almost then end of Eckersley's career.