Beside Interest Rates, What About E.R.A.?
By DAVID LEONHARDT
NY Times
Ben S. Bernanke, whom President Bush named this week to succeed Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman, has spent much of the last three decades studying interest-rate policy. But Bernanke, 51, has also found more than a little time for sports...
He attended Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, famous for Carlton Fisk's game-winning home run in the 12th inning. Bernanke has also devoured the writings of Bill James, the founder of baseball's statistical revolution...
Bernanke, a Southerner by birth who stands well shy of 6 feet, became a Red Sox fan in the mid-1970's while he was a student at Harvard. After moving to Princeton as a professor, he kept his allegiance to the Red Sox. He also became fascinated by the way that statistics can capture the game or distort it, much as they can for the economy.
Bernanke and Dwight M. Jaffee, a Princeton colleague, had a regular squash game, and they spent their walks to the campus gym talking about monetary policy and baseball, Jaffee said. Bernanke was particularly bothered by E.R.A., the main yardstick of pitching. If one pitcher leaves runners on base and another pitcher allows them to score, the runs are charged to the first pitcher.
Pitchers unlucky enough to be followed by ineffective relievers, as the Yankees' Randy Johnson was in 2005, have unfairly high E.R.A.'s. Pitchers who are bailed out by their bullpen, as Roy Oswalt of the Astros often was this season, end up with artificially low E.R.A.'s.
A better system would divide blame, depending on the base the runners were on when a pitcher departed and the number of outs, Bernanke argued.
"He was always saying, 'We ought to come up with a solution for this,' " Jaffee said.
This summer, Jaffee saw an article in The New York Times on the same topic and sent an e-mail message to Bernanke reminding him of their walks. Bernanke replied that his opinion had not changed.
He also mentioned that the Washington Nationals, his new favorite team, had lost 13 one-run games in a row. The odds of that happening, Bernanke wrote, were roughly 8,000 to 1.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 20:09 (twenty years ago)
It could be possible, considering how often a starter is pulled with runners on base. I would be suprised if it is worth more than 1/4 of a run over a season.
If you want to get into this kind of action, I always wonder about big innings that a wild pitch or error by the pitcher turns the runs into unearned. The pitcher is still at fault for allowing the runs to happen just as much if he gave up a gopher ball, but his ERA gets a break.
― Earl Nash (earlnash), Thursday, 27 October 2005 01:19 (twenty years ago)
Figure they average one inherited runner left per appearance (let's say 30 starts, 30 runners), even if every one of them scores that adds 30 earned runs over 180 total innings. Worst case, it adds 1.50 to the pitcher's earned run total. But if you assume the league average number of those runners would score (5 out of 30?), the impact is much smaller.
I was reading this thinking about how his approach is all wrong (worrying about a small number of inherited runners in the greater scheme, focusing on ERA which can be misleading, etc.) and how the Times portrays it as novel thinking, but I guess I shouldn't expect super econ-dude to have kept up with statistical analysis for the last twenty years. Ironically, though, Oswalt was near the top in BP's bullpen assistance ranking and Johnson near the bottom, but that accounts for way more than inherited runners I believe.
― Are You Nomar? (miloaukerman), Thursday, 27 October 2005 02:30 (twenty years ago)
one year passes...