Bill James: ERA doesn’t work for relievers

To our many readers, we apologize for the tumbleweeds rolling around the Loogy Lounge. Work has gotten busy for both of us.  We’ll be posting season previews soon.  But here’s part of a Q&A from everybody’s favorite stat guru, Bill James:

You often show that conventional baseball statistics aren’t as important as they appear. In the book, you write “every year that passes, the ERA (Earned Run Average) becomes a little more irrelevant.” Why is that?

The reason the ERA is becoming a little more irrelevant every year is that pitchers don’t pitch whole innings anymore. Relief pitchers anyway. If you go back to 1915, 1920, really, all pitchers pitched full innings 99% of the time. And you could measure a pitcher’s effectiveness by how many runs he allowed in those whole innings. But modern pitchers, in particular modern relievers, pitch portions of an inning. And in a situation where each pitcher pitches a portion of an inning, who you charge the run to becomes critical. And the rule on whom we charge the run to is so careless and sloppy that it doesn’t work. It often leads to pitchers having ERAs that do not reflect how they really pitch, either because the reliever allowed a bunch of runs to score that were charged to somebody else, or because the starting pitcher who left guys on base got hurt by it.

He also proposes a new rule on replacing pitchers in the middle of innings to help speed the game along:

If you were to be named commissioner of baseball tomorrow, what would be first change you make?

Well, the commissioner can’t really make changes. He can organize the process leading to change. That’s a petty answer. To give you the real answer, I’d try to do something about the game dragging in the late innings. We need to make the games snap along a little better, particularly in the late innings. There are more than six times as many pitching changes in a game now than there were two generations ago. That’s a huge change in the game. And it’s not a change for the better, in my view. Maybe it’s a change for the better in terms of trying to win. But in terms of its impact on the fans, how the fans enjoy the game, I don’t see that as a change for the better. So I’d probably try to organize some kind of move to see if we couldn’t get an agreement to limit the number of pitching changes in the late innings.

This is the rule that I would adopt. I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I don’t see why this doesn’t work. One time per game, you get a free pitching change without restriction. Otherwise, when you put a pitcher on the mound to start an inning, he has to stay in the game until he’s charged with a run allowed. In other words, you have a limit on how often you can put a pitcher out there, let him face one batter and “let’s bring in somebody else.”

Bill James has balls.