Back to the Cincinnati Reds Newsfeed

Evaluating Pitching: Part 1 – The Problems with ERA

A foundation of modern analytics in baseball is the goal of isolating the performance of an individual player from that of his teammates. That pursuit has led to new concepts and ways of evaluating performance. Revolutionary applications of technology have further advanced our ability to judge talent.

No aspect of baseball understanding has changed more in the past decade than evaluation of pitchers. In this series, Jordan Barhorst and I take a look at how measuring pitchers has evolved in the past few years and apply those new metrics to the Reds pitching staff.

We start with a look at two statistics, pitcher Wins and ERA, and their weaknesses as measurements.