Introduction to Lights Out, Lit Up, and Everything in Between
Understanding Starting Pitchers Performances
In baseball, a pitcher’s job is to stop the other side from scoring runs.
You’re looking for a simple straight-forward way to determine who the ‘best’ pitchers
were in baseball’s postseason games. You decide to look at Innings Pitched and Earned
Runs allowed, and then give them some kind of score for each game they started. As if he
had pitched the whole 9 innings, you say to yourself. You call it gERA, short for Game
ERA. It tells you how many runs the pitcher would have given up as if he had pitched the
whole 9 innings of a game.
Then you decide to look at how his team did in games that he started. Not the pitcher’s
Won-Lost record, mind you, but how his team did that day. The task at hand is to win
games, and looking at the pitcher’s W-L record is also to show how well his team batted in
that game. Or how well the bullpen pitched after he handed it a lead. We just want to
see how the pitcher pitched. That's all.
Quality starts, too. Using a quick formula that gives us the pitcher’s gERA (ERx9/IP),
we are given a ‘score’ that shows how many runs the pitcher would have given up as if he
had pitched 9 full innings. Anything at 4.50 or less is considered a Quality Start. 6 Innings
Pitched and 3 Earned Runs allowed is a gERA of 4.50 (3x9/6=4.50). Just so happens that
teams score between 4 and 5 runs a game, generally. 4.49 to be exact. So anything at 4.50
(or less) gives his team a chance to win the game. The ‘score’ the pitcher gets is called
gERA. Although it may not be the perfect way to judge a pitcher, it is always precise.
[Note: a gERA Chart has been included in the beginning of the book to help you along.]
Team W-L Record and Quality Start Percentage, then. No more, no less. Almost 1200
games, from 1903 to 2007. Over 600 pitchers. Innings Pitched and Earned Runs allowed
for each of them. And the gERA score for each pitcher in each game. And only one
pitcher with at least 7 postseason starts has gERAs of 2.00 or lower in every game. Any
guesses?
The highest gERA ever in a postseason game belongs to Gil Heredia in a Divisional
Series game against the Yankees in 2000. He allowed 6 earned runs while getting only 1
out. Six runs times 9 divided by one-third of an inning? A gERA of 162.00. Yanks held on
the win the game, 7-5, by the way.
But who was the best starting pitcher ever in baseball’s own little October festival?
Judge for yourself. Browse away. See why certain pitchers have the reputations they
have when the really big games are on the line. For better, or for worse.