ERA for relief pitcher

Found it in OBR

10.18

(i) When pitchers are changed during an inning, the relief pitcher shall "not" have the benefit of previous chances for outs not accepted in determining earned runs.
NOTE: It is the intent of this rule to charge relief pitchers with earned runs for which they are solely responsible. In some instances, runs charged as earned against the relief pitcher can be charged as unearned against the team.
EXAMPLES: (1) With two out, P1 walks A. B reaches base on an error. P2 relieves P1. C hits home run, scoring three runs. Charge two unearned runs to P1, one earned run to P2.
(2) With two out, P1 walks A and B and is relieved by P2. C reaches base on an error. D hits home run, scoring four runs. Charge two unearned runs to P1, two unearned runs to P2.
(3) With none out, P1 walks A. B reaches base on an error. P2 relieves P1. C hits home run, scoring three runs. D and E strike out. F reaches base on an error. G hits home run, scoring two runs. Charge two runs, one earned, to P1. Charge three runs, one earned, to P2.

If you've ever heard the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", this is a great example! A team can have more unearned runs than you would tally by summing up the unearned runs yielded by each pitcher on the roster.

Yea, it's been interesting for my son this season, so far. He leads the team in two catagories, runs allowed and lowest ERA. Can anyone say "E"? (and no, I'm not cooking the books, we do group scoring, it's fun when we occasionally disagree)

obrady,

I applaud anyone who takes the time to really dig for answers in the rule books, but once again, I implore you to look in the right book! I know its only a technical thing, but the rules are the rules. I suggest you get your hands on an NFHS book, and always go to that one for any ruling on a HS game.

Most people ASSUME the NFHS rules on earned runs are the same as OBR, but they aren’t. See 9-6-3 and 9-6-5. NFHS doesn’t say jack about errors committed prior to a reliever entering the game, nor does it say anything about team earned/unearned runs. All it says is a relief P shall not be charged for earned runs scored by a runner who was on base when he entered the game(paraphrase).

The real question is, should scorer’s ignore what NFHS says and use OBR to determine ER’s? Technically no. As far as NFHS is concerned, there are no other rule sets in existence. But in reality, NFHS does such a poor job on some of its rules, I have no problem with using OBR in the spirit of proper baseball scoring.

Besides, you’d be amazed at how many HS rule adjudicators use OBR as a reference in making decisions.

This is just another example of why I think all these weird rule sets need to go! There needs to be a basic set of baseball rules, which there is in OBR, then the organizations who feel they need to modify those rules should do that, not come out with entirely new rule books such as NFHS and NCAA.

quote:

Originally posted by obrady:
Yea, it's been interesting for my son this season, so far. He leads the team in two catagories, runs allowed and lowest ERA. Can anyone say "E"? (and no, I'm not cooking the books, we do group scoring, it's fun when we occasionally disagree)

Isn’t it terrible how people assume they have to tell people they aren’t cheating? I guess that comes from so many examples of it happening.

When it’s really fun, is when two people can find what seem to be conflicting things in the rules!

When my son was in HS, he had pretty much the same problem, and I got fed up with people blaming him for things that were completely beyond his control, especially this one moron asst coach he had.

So, I started to see what I could do to paint more of a “true” picture about what was happening. The 1st thing I did was to track E’s made behind P’s. Right away that showed something pretty ugly. In his 4 years of HS pitching, there were 71 errors made behind him in 273 IPs. That was pretty bad, but of course I was accused of “cooking the books’, even though I was only the OSK for one of the 4 years.

Next I came up with “Run Support for Pitchers”. Nearly every P on any team he pitched for in HS got much more run support than he did. He received .55 runs per inning, which was lower than all but 2 of the P’s he pitched with.

But still his detractors found fault with him, as though everything bad that happened was his fault, so I dug a little farther and came up with GBO/FBO ratio from the Saber guys. When I started looking at that, everything got real clear, real quick.

His ratio of GBO’s to FBO’s was enormous! That meant when he pitched, the defense got a lot of opportunities to make fielding plays they didn’t get when most other ‘s were throwing. Turns out that unlike in the ML where a P like Maddux who has a high GBO/FBO ratio is with his weight in gold because ML fielders are great, to say the least.

But in HS where the skill of the average infielder is nowhere near that of the average ML fielder, and the condition of the average HS field compared to the average ML field looks more like a goat farm than a baseball field, things are very different indeed.

Yes, the HS P who gets a lot of grounders is still valuable, but there’s no way a lot of errors aren’t gonna be made behind them. I know it sounds backwards, but that’s the way it normally is in HS. What’s amazing to me is, how little that’s really understood by the fans, coach’s, and the players, and how easy it is to fix. It’s a basic fundamental of baseball and only needs a lot of repetitions to show a dramatic improvement.

Do you or does your team track those things? If not, see if you can snatch the scorebook to do it yourself. Its really to do, and it might open a few eyes!

After visiting Turner Field a few years ago, I now have little sympathy for major leaguers making a lot of errors. I've putted on greens that weren't a nice and smooth as the outfield much less the infield.

My PDA does track GB outs and FO outs.

quote:

Originally posted by obrady:
After visiting Turner Field a few years ago, I now have little sympathy for major leaguers making a lot of errors. I've putted on greens that weren't a nice and smooth as the outfield much less the infield.

Once you’ve seen that even the worst ML fields are better than the best HS fields, isn’t it a joke when you hear the announcers talk about a “tough hop”? I had a friend who made a brief appearance on the PGA tour and used to gripe about the conditions at this course or that. One day I finally got fed up and told him he needed to
play the courses us mere mortals had to play and see if he’d still moan and groan.

Its all in the perspective!;

My PDA does track GB outs and FO outs.
Have you looked at them in relation to the E’s made behind the P’s, ERA’s, etc..? If you’re curious as to how your guys compare to others, take a look at http://www.infosports.com/scorekeeper/images/pitching.pdf page 12&13 for this season’s stuff for the team I’m scoring for. Or, you can see what happened in the fall at http://infosports.net/scorekeeper/images/fallpit.pdf pages 9&10. I tried to put some things on the report to help see how the GBO/FBO might relate to other things,

Out of curiosity, how does your PDA charge the 2nd out on a DP that was started by a FB or LD, such as a liner to the P who throws to the SS for a DP at 2nd? I’ve been charging both outs as FBO’s, but I never really knew for sure.