re a rooky question about the era whitty cv hp com joe whitty writes thomas theiner thein damabus informatik rwth aachen de wrote hi there i m german and i have been into this mlb stuff since almost one year now there are many problems occuring for me one of them is the era statistic for pitchers what does it say era indicates the average number of earned runs attributed to a pitcher per nine inning game thus if a pitcher pitched innings and gave up earned run his inning equivelent perfomance would be earned runs thus his era is to compute the era you simply take the number of earned runs divided by the innings pitched and then multiple the result by era er ip i think there is another formula for era i heard something about it last year im not sure what it is but im gonna give it a stab it allows for a pitcher to pitch more than innings at a time and not benefit cuz it uses outs recorded instead of innings pitched era er outs recorded like i said im not sure this is exactly it but im pretty sure they changed it to something of the sort an earned run is run that is given up by the pitcher that is not attributed to a fielding error more specifically if an error occurs that represented the third out all runs scored after the error are considered unearned runs earned runs are also runs scored as a result of players who were left on base when the pitcher exited the game here are some examples if there are two outs in an inning and there are men on base if an error occurs that represents the third out all of the runs after this error and not counted as earned runs if a pitcher issues some base on balls walks and leaves the game before the inning is completed he is responsible for the people who were left on base if the those runners who were left on base score and the score was not a result of an error those eraned runs are attributed to the pitcher who left the game i hope this explains things for you joe
