ERA formula

Shucks Ag, you shore know how to make a guy's day!

I suppose in the great scheme of things, it wouldn't make any difference if you put your Aunt Matilda in to pitch. After all, I don't think the world will stop turning depending on the outcome of a single youth baseball game.

But let's assume there is some earth shattering importance on this particular game and we really want to give ourselves the best chance to win. I begin the process of making the choice by using what else, the stats!

I have several pitching reports, but for this particular scenario, there are two that would probably be much more useful. One is a printout of all opponents and our pitcher's stats against them.

Now I can take a look to see how our pitchers have done against them in the past. If we haven't played them before, hopefully my scouting report can give me some idea about what kind of team they are and try to find out how our guys have done against similar teams.

The other report is virtually the same information, but grouped by each pitcher's appearances in order of date. Now I can look to see which guy is doing better recently by judging their performances against the teams they threw against.

That's important because maybe P1 started the season by getting pounded all over the place, but has reduced his ERA from 15.00 to 4.00 and P2 has done just the opposite. I'd wanna go with the guy who's on a roll.

If things are still unclear, its easy enough to take a look at a couple more reports. One shows the basics, like not only how many runs and ER's, but what kid of hits they've given up (S,D,T,HR), walks, HBP, Ks, Ks looking, pick offs, balks, strikes, hit strikes, non hit strikes, opponent BA, 1st strike % and how many batters who walked or got hit scored.

In conjunction with that one, there's another one that shows pitches per batter, pitches per BB, pitches per K, Ks per inning, walks per inning and K to BB ratio. By now I should have a pretty darn good idea who's gonna throw, but it still might be a toss up.

If necessary, I can go to the reports based on pitch counts and find out who is giving up hits on what counts, who has a tendency to throw what pitch on a certain count, what to expect when a pitcher gets to any 3 ball count, and a whole lot of other things, and the more info you have about the other team, the more the data you have on your pitchers means.

In the end, it isn't how many runs they've given up in the past that should be the major concer between two pitchers, but rather how they did that. For instance, if you're gonna play a team with a bunch of power in the lineup, you wouldn't really want to throw the guy who shows a tendency to give up a lot of jacks. Its the same thing if you know the team you'll be playing takes a lot of pitches, you darn sure don't want to throw the pitcher who walks a lot of batters.

Yep! The team with the highest number in the "R" column wins the game! Just like golf, you put down the result, you don't draw a pictogram about how it happened. But, just as you wouldn't take out a driver on a hole with trouble right and left and only 20 yards wide because you're playing the odds, you wouldn't want to "knowingly" make a similar mistake by putting a pitcher on the mound who's "tendencies" aren't favorable to the situation.

If all of the planning and analysis still leaves you unsure, there's always fling, flang, floo or eeney, meeney, miney, moe!