ERA in Baseball: What It Means and How It's Calculated

Bob Gibson was charged with 38 earned runs in 1968. He pitched 304 and two-thirds innings for the St. Louis Cardinals that summer, and those two figures, run through one line of arithmetic from the Official Baseball Rules, produce the 1.12 that persuaded Major League Baseball to rebuild every pitching mound in the country.

ERA stands for earned run average. It is the number of earned runs a pitcher allows for every nine innings he pitches, found by multiplying his earned runs by nine and dividing by his innings. Lower is better. In MLB a full-season ERA under 3.00 is excellent, the league as a whole usually finishes somewhere around 4.00, and a starter living above 5.00 is pitching for his place in the rotation. Runs that score because of an error or a passed ball are unearned and stay out of the count.

What ERA stands for and what the number actually says

Earned run average is a rate, not a total. It takes whatever a pitcher has done, over one inning or three thousand, and restates it as the earned runs he would give up across nine innings at that pace. Nine was chosen because it is the length of a regulation game, which means the number can be read almost as a score: a 3.50 ERA describes a pitcher who, left in for a whole game on an average day, hands the other side three or four runs.

That is why it travels so well. A fan does not need the innings total or the season to get a first impression from "2.85" or "5.40." The figure also sits on the same scale as the thing it is trying to explain. A team that scores 4.5 runs a game with a staff ERA of 3.80 is going to win more than it loses, and nobody needs a formula to see it.

Three points about the definition are worth holding on to.

The average covers earned runs only. Runs allowed and earned runs are separate columns in a box score, R and ER, and they often differ by one or two on a sloppy night. The sibling statistic that counts everything, runs allowed per nine innings, is usually written RA9. It gets far less attention than it deserves.

The denominator is innings, which in practice means outs. A pitcher is credited with a third of an inning for every out recorded while he is on the mound, however the out happens, including a runner thrown out stealing.

And it is a cumulative figure. A pitcher's ERA on August 1 is every earned run and every inning since Opening Day, which is why it lurches around in April and barely moves in September. A seven-run disaster in his second start can sit in the number for two months.

One usage note. Broadcasters say "E-R-A," letter by letter, never "era." The possessive form on a graphic, "ERA: 3.12," is always the season to date unless it says career.

How ERA is calculated: the formula worked by hand

Rule 9.21(e) of the Official Baseball Rules gives the method in a sentence: multiply the total earned runs charged against the pitcher by nine, and divide the result by the total number of innings pitched, including fractions of an inning.

Written out:

ERA = (earned runs × 9) ÷ innings pitched

One start

A starter goes seven innings and gives up two earned runs. Two times nine is 18. Eighteen divided by seven is 2.57. For that night, his ERA is 2.57.

A rougher one: four innings, five earned runs. Five times nine is 45, divided by four is 11.25. Single-game ERAs get large in a hurry, which is the first clue that the statistic needs volume before it means much.

A pitcher who allows an earned run and is pulled before recording an out has an undefined ERA for the day, since the division is by zero. Scoreboards show it as infinity or as a dash, and it corrects itself the moment he gets his first out of the season.

A season line

Take Gibson's 1968 again. Thirty-eight earned runs times nine is 342. He pitched 304 and two-thirds innings, which is 304.667 for a calculator. Dividing 342 by 304.667 gives 1.1225, and the convention is to round to two decimal places: 1.12.

Pedro Martinez in 2000 makes a cleaner example because his innings came out whole. Forty-two earned runs in 217 innings: 378 divided by 217 is 1.74.

1. 1Earned runsTake the earned runs from the ER column, not the R column. Gibson was charged with 38.
2. 2MultiplyMultiply by nine, the innings in a regulation game. 38 times 9 is 342.
3. 3InningsConvert the innings to a true decimal. 304.2 in a box score is 304 and two-thirds, or 304.667.
4. 4DivideDivide the first figure by the second. 342 divided by 304.667 is 1.1225.
5. 5RoundRound to two decimal places. The season goes in the book as 1.12.

The method set out in Rule 9.21(e) of the Official Baseball Rules, using Bob Gibson's 1968 season as the example.

There is a shortcut that avoids fractions entirely. Count the outs instead of the innings, and multiply the earned runs by 27 instead of nine. Gibson recorded 914 outs; 38 times 27 is 1,026; 1,026 divided by 914 is the same 1.1225. Anyone building a spreadsheet should store outs, because the shortcut removes the most common error in the whole exercise.

Why the box score says 6.1 and 6.2: innings counted in thirds

An inning has three outs, so a pitcher's work comes in thirds. Baseball's shorthand writes those thirds after a decimal point, and the decimal point is a lie. "6.1" is six innings and one out. "6.2" is six innings and two outs. There is no 6.3; the next out makes it 7.0.

Older newspapers set the fractions properly, as 6⅓ and 6⅔, and some stat pages still do. The dotted form took over because agate type and then database columns handled it more easily. It has been confusing people ever since.

The mistake is to type the box-score figure straight into the formula. A pitcher who allows three earned runs in "6.1" innings has pitched 6.333 innings, and his ERA for the game is 4.26. Enter 6.1 as though it meant six and one-tenth and the answer comes out 4.43. The error always pushes the same way, toward a higher ERA, because the tenths understate how long he pitched.

Box score shows	Innings actually pitched	Outs recorded	Game ERA with 3 earned runs	ERA if the decimal is read as tenths
6.0	6	18	4.50	4.50
6.1	6⅓ (6.333)	19	4.26	4.43
6.2	6⅔ (6.667)	20	4.05	4.35
7.0	7	21	3.86	3.86
0.1	⅓ (0.333)	1	81.00	270.00

The bottom row shows how badly it can go for a reliever. One out and three earned runs is an 81.00 ERA, which is ugly enough. Read as a tenth of an inning it becomes 270.00.

Adding innings across games takes the same care. A pitcher who goes 6.2 and then 5.2 has thrown 12.1 innings, not 11.4: two outs plus two outs is four outs, which is one full inning and one out left over. Season totals are built this way, out by out, and the fraction is carried into the division exactly as Rule 9.21(e) requires. Our guide on how to keep score in baseball shows where those outs are recorded on a scoresheet as the game goes along.

The opposite error exists too. Some older record books rounded innings to the nearest whole number before computing ERA, which is why a handful of historical figures differ by a hundredth of a run depending on the source.

Which runs count: the earned run in brief

The word doing the work in "earned run average" is the first one. An earned run, under Rule 9.16, is a run for which the pitcher is held accountable. In plain terms it is a run that scores without the help of an error or a passed ball.

The official scorer decides. At the end of any inning in which a fielder made an error or the catcher let a pitch get by that he should have handled, the scorer replays the inning in his head as though the misplay had not happened. Runs that would have scored anyway are earned. Runs that needed the mistake are unearned. If the third out would already have been made, everything after that point is unearned, no matter how hard the ball was hit. A two-out error followed by a grand slam is four unearned runs.

A few cases catch people out.

• A pitcher's own error counts as an error. If he throws a bunt into right field, runs that follow are unearned to him just as if the shortstop had done it.
• A wild pitch is the pitcher's fault. Runners who advance or score on one are earned. A passed ball is the catcher's, and those are not.
• The extra-inning automatic runner is unearned. The runner MLB places on second base to begin each half-inning from the tenth onward in the regular season is treated, for scoring purposes, as though he had reached on an error, with no error charged to anyone. If he scores, the pitcher takes a run but not an earned run.
• Catcher's interference and a batter reaching on a dropped third strike can each create unearned runs, depending on how the scorer assigns the misplay.

There is also a bookkeeping quirk for relievers. A pitcher who enters mid-inning does not get the benefit of chances for outs that were wasted before he arrived. An inning can therefore contain a run that is earned against the reliever but unearned in the team's totals, which is why a club's earned runs sometimes come to less than the sum of its pitchers'.

The full inning-by-inning reconstruction, with worked examples, belongs to our page on the earned run and the unearned run. For ERA the short version is enough: errors and passed balls erase runs from the pitcher's account, and a human being in the press box decides what was an error.

Inherited runners and who pays for them

Seventh inning, one out, runners on first and second. The manager takes the ball from his starter. The reliever's second pitch is lined into the gap and both runners score.

Those two runs belong to the starter. Rule 9.16(g) charges a run to the pitcher who allowed the runner to reach base, wherever that pitcher happens to be sitting when the runner crosses the plate. The reliever is charged with a double and nothing else. His ERA does not move. The starter's line, which read one earned run when he handed over the ball, now reads three.

The logic is defensible. The man who put the runner on created the danger. But the consequence is that a starter's ERA depends in part on who follows him, and a reliever can do his job poorly without the statistic noticing.

It cuts in a second direction. A reliever who comes in with the bases loaded and nobody out and escapes with no runs scoring has done something valuable, and his ERA gives him credit only for three ordinary outs. The number treats a clean inning begun from scratch and a rescue as the same event.

The rule has one refinement that is easy to miss. The charge follows the number of runners left behind, not the individual men. Suppose the starter leaves a runner on first, and the reliever gets a ground ball that forces that runner at second while the batter reaches on the fielder's choice. The original runner is gone, but the starter is still responsible for one runner on base. If the batter who reached on the force comes around to score, the run is charged to the starter.

Box scores track this with two columns for relievers: IR, inherited runners, and IS, inherited runners who scored. Across the majors something like three in ten inherited runners come home in a typical season, and a reliever who is well above that rate is costing his team runs that his ERA will never show. Anyone trying to judge a middle reliever should look there before looking at ERA. The roles those pitchers fill, and how a manager sequences them, are laid out in our guide to how a bullpen is built.

Starters know all this. It is one reason a veteran left in to finish an inning he started will sometimes say afterward that he would rather lose the game himself than watch someone else lose it for him.

What a good ERA is in MLB, and how the average has moved

There is no official scale. The one that follows is the working version scouts, writers and front offices carry in their heads for a starting pitcher across a full season in a normal scoring year.

ERA over a full season	How it is usually described	What it tends to mean
Under 2.00	Historic	A handful of seasons per generation; an automatic Cy Young candidate
2.00 to 2.99	Excellent	An ace; among the league's top ten or so starters
3.00 to 3.74	Good	A solid number two or three starter on a contender
3.75 to 4.49	Average	Around the league mean in most recent seasons
4.50 to 4.99	Below average	A back-end starter holding a job on durability
5.00 and above	Poor	Replaceable; a rotation spot at risk

The trouble with any fixed scale is that the middle of it moves. The league-wide ERA is a measurement of the run-scoring environment, and that environment has swung hard.

American League and National League combined, rounded to one decimal place. Selected seasons chosen to show the extremes, not a continuous series.

Show the numbers

League-wide ERA in selected MLB seasons

Item	League ERA
1908	2.4
1930	4.8
1968	3
1987	4.3
2000	4.8
2014	3.7
2019	4.5

In 1968, the so-called Year of the Pitcher, the two leagues combined for an ERA of 2.98. A pitcher at 3.00 that year was an ordinary one. In 2000 the combined figure was above 4.75, and in the American League that year, with the designated hitter and the offensive surge of that period at its height, it was 4.91. A 4.00 ERA there was comfortably better than average.

So the same number carries different weight in different years. A 3.50 in 1968 was mediocre. A 3.50 in 2000 put a starter among the best in his league.

The league and the ballpark matter in the same way within a single season. For most of the period between 1973 and 2021 the American League used the designated hitter and the National League did not, which meant National League pitchers faced a pitcher batting ninth and ran slightly lower ERAs for it. That gap closed when the DH became universal for good in 2022.

The practical advice: before judging an ERA, find out what the league average was that year. Everything on the scale above shifts with it.

Qualifying for the ERA title: one inning per team game

Rule 9.22(b) says the pitching champion of a league is the pitcher with the lowest earned run average, provided he has pitched at least as many innings as the number of games scheduled for each club in his league that season.

In a 162-game season that is 162 innings. One inning for every game his team plays.

The threshold is tied to the schedule, not fixed at a number, so it moves when the season does. In the 60-game season of 2020 the minimum was 60 innings; Shane Bieber won the American League title for Cleveland at 1.63 in a little over 77 innings. Under the 154-game schedule of the early 1950s the bar was 154.

That older bar produced the great exception to the idea that relievers cannot win. In 1952 Hoyt Wilhelm, a 29-year-old rookie knuckleballer with the New York Giants, pitched in 71 games without starting one, piled up just over 159 innings and led the National League at 2.43. No pure reliever has won the title since. One did reach the innings: Mike Marshall threw 208 and a third for the Dodgers in 1974 without making a start, across a record 106 appearances, and finished at 2.42. Bullpens are no longer used that way.

The reason is workload. A modern closer or setup man throws somewhere between 55 and 75 innings in a season. He would need more than two seasons of work to reach the minimum for one. Leaderboards that show a reliever with a 1.40 ERA are using a lower cutoff or none at all, and should say so.

Why fewer pitchers qualify now

The bar has not moved. The pitchers have. As starters throw fewer innings per outing and teams use the injured list and six-man rotations more freely, the number of pitchers reaching 162 innings has fallen sharply; in some recent seasons fewer than fifty across both leagues got there, roughly half the count of a decade earlier. A starter who makes 28 starts and averages five and two-thirds innings finishes with about 159 and misses.

This has had an odd effect on the title race. A pitcher with the best ERA in the league in mid-September can fall off the leaderboard by missing two starts. Rule 9.22 has no provision for adding phantom innings to a pitcher who comes up short, the way the batting title rule adds hitless at-bats to a hitter short of the plate-appearance minimum. He qualifies or he does not.

A pitcher traded between leagues in midseason has his innings split, and needs to qualify within one league to win that league's title.

A starter's ERA and a reliever's ERA are different currencies

Put a 3.20 ERA from a starter next to a 3.20 from a reliever and they look identical. They are not worth the same.

Start with the lineup. A starter who is doing his job faces the batting order twice and usually part of a third time, and hitters do measurably better against a pitcher each time they see him in a game. They have timed the fastball and seen the breaking ball. Analysts call this the times-through-the-order penalty, and it is the main reason managers now pull starters earlier than they once did. A reliever faces three to six hitters once each and leaves.

Then the effort. A starter paces himself across 90 or 100 pitches and has to carry three or four pitch types to survive. A reliever throws 15 pitches at full effort with his best two. The same arm, moved from the rotation to the bullpen, will typically throw harder and post a lower ERA. Plenty of failed starters have become dominant closers on exactly that basis, and very few have gone the other way.

There is a structural advantage as well. Relievers are often brought in partway through an inning with one or two outs already made. A runner the reliever puts on with two outs has only one out's worth of time to score, where the same runner allowed to lead off an inning has three. Combine that with the inherited-runner rule and a reliever's ERA can look healthy through a stretch of mediocre pitching.

The cost of all this is noise. Sixty innings is a small sample. One outing of five earned runs in a third of an inning adds three-quarters of a run to a 60-inning ERA all by itself; spread over a starter's 180 innings, the same blowup adds a quarter of a run. A reliever's ERA can halve or double from one year to the next with no change in how he is throwing.

League-wide, bullpens have posted a lower collective ERA than rotations in most recent seasons, though the gap varies and has occasionally closed. As a rule of thumb, mentally add something to a reliever's ERA before comparing it with a starter's.

The record book reflects the split. Mariano Rivera's career ERA of 2.21 is the lowest of any American or National League pitcher whose career fell entirely in the live-ball era with at least 1,000 innings. Among starting pitchers of the same period, Clayton Kershaw's 2.53 at his retirement after the 2025 season is the lowest, and even that sits a hundredth behind the 2.52 that Hoyt Wilhelm compiled over 2,254 innings, nearly all of them in relief. Nobody seriously argues that the distance between Rivera's figure and Kershaw's measures a difference in ability. Relievers are instead judged by leverage, which is what the save was invented to capture.

What ERA cannot separate from the pitcher

Every earned run is charged to one man, and at least four other things had a hand in it.

The fielders behind him

The unearned-run rule removes runs that follow an error. It does nothing about the ball a slow left fielder does not reach. A fly ball that falls two steps in front of a fielder with poor range is a hit, any run that follows is earned, and the pitcher's ERA goes up exactly as if he had been hit hard. A staff in front of a fast, well-positioned defense will post a lower ERA than the same staff in front of a poor one. This is the insight behind fielding-independent measures, which rebuild a pitcher's record from strikeouts, walks and home runs alone; our explainer on FIP covers how that is done.

His home ballpark

A pitcher makes about half his starts at home. In Denver, at altitude, the ball carries farther and breaks less, and Coors Field has inflated ERAs for visiting and home pitchers alike since it opened. Parks with deep fences and heavy marine air do the reverse. Raw ERA ignores it. The size of the effect, and how it is measured, is the subject of our piece on park factors.

The official scorer

Whether a hard ground ball off a third baseman's glove is a hit or an error is a judgment, and the judgment decides whether the runs that follow are earned. Scorers have grown more reluctant to charge errors over the decades. In the first years of the twentieth century something like a quarter or more of all runs were unearned; in the modern game it is under one in ten. That shift alone makes ERAs from 1908 and 2008 awkward to compare, and it means a modern ERA captures nearly everything that scores.

The order the hits fell in

A single, a single, a home run and a strikeout is three runs. A home run, a single, a single and a strikeout is one run with two men left on. Same hits, same inning. Pitchers have some influence over this, since a strikeout pitcher is better equipped to leave runners where they are, but a great deal of it is sequence and nothing more. League-wide, a little over seven in ten baserunners are stranded, and a pitcher far from that mark in either direction in one season tends to drift back the next.

None of this makes ERA useless. Over several seasons the fielding, the luck and the scoring decisions wash toward the middle, and the pitchers at the top of a career ERA list are the best pitchers. Over 60 innings, or one summer in one ballpark, it is a description of what happened to a pitcher more than a verdict on him.

ERA+ and ERA-: adjusting for ballpark and league

Pedro Martinez's 1.74 in 2000 and Bob Gibson's 1.12 in 1968 are 62 hundredths of a run apart, and the higher one is the better season. Adjusted ERA exists to show why.

ERA+ takes the league's ERA, adjusts it for the pitcher's home park, divides it by the pitcher's own ERA and multiplies by 100. The result is an index.

• 100 is league average, by construction, in any season.
• Higher is better. This reverses the direction of ERA itself, which trips up almost everyone the first time.
• A 150 means the league's park-adjusted ERA was 50 percent higher than the pitcher's. Put the other way, his ERA was two-thirds of the league's.

It does not mean he was "50 percent better" in the sense of allowing half the runs. Allowing half the league's rate would be an ERA+ of 200.

Pedro Martinez, 2000 (1.74 ERA)291

Dutch Leonard, 1914 (0.96 ERA)279

Greg Maddux, 1994 (1.56 ERA)271

Bob Gibson, 1968 (1.12 ERA)258

Adjusted ERA as generally published, where 100 is league average and higher is better. Published values can differ by a point or two between sources because park adjustments are calculated differently.

Show the numbers

ERA+ in four celebrated low-ERA seasons

Item	Value
Pedro Martinez, 2000 (1.74 ERA)	291
Dutch Leonard, 1914 (0.96 ERA)	279
Greg Maddux, 1994 (1.56 ERA)	271
Bob Gibson, 1968 (1.12 ERA)	258

Martinez pitched his home games in Fenway Park, a hitter's park, in a league with a 4.91 ERA. The runner-up for the American League ERA title that year, Roger Clemens, finished at 3.70, nearly two full runs behind. Gibson pitched in a league where the average was under 3.00. Once the surroundings are stripped out, the 1.74 comes out ahead of the 1.12, and the 0.96 falls between them.

ERA- runs the other way

ERA- is the same idea turned over. It divides the pitcher's ERA by the park-adjusted league figure, so 100 is still average but lower is better, matching the direction of ERA. An ERA- of 70 means the pitcher allowed earned runs at 70 percent of the league rate, or 30 percent below it. Some analysts prefer it because the percentages read directly: 70 is 30 percent better than average, where 150 on the plus scale does not translate so cleanly.

The two are reciprocals in spirit. An ERA+ of 150 corresponds to an ERA- of about 67.

The plus-and-minus family extends across the stat sheet. Hitters get the same treatment in OPS+, and the reading rule never changes: 100 is average, and the sign in the name tells you which direction is good.

What the adjusted versions do not fix is everything in the previous section apart from the park. Defense, the scorer and sequencing are all still inside the number.

The record book: Walsh, Leonard and Gibson's 1.12

The career record belongs to Ed Walsh, a spitballer for the Chicago White Sox whose ERA across 14 seasons from 1904 to 1917 was 1.82. In 1908 alone he pitched 464 innings and won 40 games, a workload that would cover two and a half modern seasons. Addie Joss of Cleveland is second at 1.89; he died in April 1911, two days after his thirty-first birthday, and the Hall of Fame later waived its ten-season requirement to admit him. The career list is conventionally limited to pitchers with at least 1,000 innings.

Both men pitched every inning of their careers with a ball that was soft, scuffed and legally doctored, in the conditions described in our history of the dead-ball era. No pitcher who worked mainly after 1920 is close.

The single-season record is more crowded and more argued over.

Tim Keefe, 18800.86

Dutch Leonard, 19140.96

Mordecai Brown, 19061.04

Bob Gibson, 19681.12

Christy Mathewson, 19091.14

Walter Johnson, 19131.14

Seasons as listed in the standard record books. Tim Keefe's 1880 figure came in 105 innings under nineteenth-century conditions and is usually listed apart from the modern record.

Show the numbers

The lowest single-season ERAs among American and National League qualifiers

Item	Value
Tim Keefe, 1880	0.86
Dutch Leonard, 1914	0.96
Mordecai Brown, 1906	1.04
Bob Gibson, 1968	1.12
Christy Mathewson, 1909	1.14
Walter Johnson, 1913	1.14

Dutch Leonard of the Boston Red Sox set the modern mark in 1914, at 0.96 in just under 225 innings. He allowed 24 earned runs all year. Tim Keefe's 0.86 for the Troy Trojans in 1880 is lower, but it covered 105 innings in a season of 80-odd games, with the pitcher throwing from a box 45 feet from the plate, and most lists set it to one side. Keefe and Leonard are the only two pitchers to finish a qualifying season in those leagues under 1.00.

Since 2024 MLB's official record has also included the Negro Leagues of 1920 to 1948, whose shorter league seasons produce some very low qualifying figures; Satchel Paige's 1944 season with the Kansas City Monarchs, 98 and a third innings long, is listed at 1.01, third on the integrated list behind Keefe and Leonard. The background to that decision is in our guide to Negro Leagues history.

Gibson, 1968, and the ten-inch mound

Gibson's 1.12 is the one that changed the sport. It is the lowest in the American or National League since the live ball arrived in 1920, by a distance, and the record for any pitcher with 300 innings. He threw 13 shutouts. He also lost nine games, which says most of what needs saying about the Cardinals' offense and about 1968 in general: the American League batting champion, Carl Yastrzemski, hit .301.

Baseball's rules committee responded that winter. For 1969 the maximum height of the mound was cut from 15 inches to 10, and the strike zone was shrunk at the top and the bottom. Scoring recovered at once. Nobody has posted an ERA under 1.50 over a full 162-game season since.

The closest approaches have been Dwight Gooden's 1.53 for the Mets in 1985 and Greg Maddux's 1.56 for Atlanta in 1994, the second of those in a season cut short by the players' strike. All such totals are fixed. The active career leaders are not, and move with every start.

Where earned run average came from

Henry Chadwick did not invent ERA so much as make it possible. Chadwick, born in England, raised in Brooklyn and a cricket writer before he was a baseball one, spent half a century shaping how the game was recorded. He developed the box score and the idea of sorting runs by cause. In his scheme of the 1860s and 1870s a run was "earned" when the batting side produced it through hits and "unearned" when fielding errors gave it away. He was grading batters and fielders. The pitcher, who at that time tossed the ball underhand to a spot the batter requested, was barely part of the question.

The meaning shifted as the pitcher's job did. Once overhand pitching was legal and the pitcher became the central figure of the defense, earned runs came to be read as his responsibility. Guides of the period printed earned-run figures on and off. None of it was official, and the methods were not consistent from year to year.

What settled the matter was the decline of the complete game. As long as a pitcher finished nearly everything he started, his won-lost record was a fair if crude summary of his season. By the first decade of the twentieth century managers such as John McGraw were using relief pitchers on purpose, and the record fell apart: a starter could leave with a lead and get no decision, or a reliever could give up the tying run and be handed the win when his team scored again.

John Heydler, then secretary of the National League, pushed for a statistic that judged a pitcher on runs and innings regardless of the decision. The National League began keeping earned run average officially in 1912, and for a time it was known informally as Heydler's statistic. The American League followed a year later.

Figures for seasons before that were worked out afterward by researchers going back through box scores and play accounts, which is why Walsh's 1.82 and Keefe's 0.86 exist at all, and why a few early numbers have been revised as better records surfaced.

For most of the next 80 years ERA was the measure of a pitcher, sharing the stage only with wins. It has since been joined by traffic counts such as WHIP, by start-by-start tallies such as the quality start, and by the fielding-independent family. It remains the first pitching number shown on any broadcast, and the first one listed on the pitching pages of our baseball coverage. A hundred and some years on, the question it asks is still the right one: how many runs did he give up, and how long did he pitch?