| The Story
When it comes to evaluating pitchers, telling statistics include ERA, strikeouts, walks, and for closers, saves and save opportunities. Popular baseball statistics do an excellent job of evaluating a pitcher, because they measure his ability to prevent the opposing team's players from reaching base and scoring runs. However, there is a gap in measuring the value of relief pitchers. There is no mainstream statistic that evaluates a relief pitcher's ability to prevent inherited base runners from scoring. When a relief pitcher enters the game with runners on base, he has the responsibility of preventing those runners from scoring. However, if he allows those runners to score, his ERA is unchanged, while the ERA of the pitcher who allowed those runners to reach base increases.
We think this is a problem, so we have created a way to penalize a relief pitcher for allowing those runners to score, and reward him for preventing those runners from scoring. To measure the ability of a relief pitcher to prevent inherited runners from scoring, we have created a new pitching statistic: The RELIEF RUN AVERAGE® (R.R.A.®) relief quotient. The R.R.A.® measures this ability with a number that is lower when the pitcher is better. So, this number increases after an appearance in which a relief pitcher allows inherited runners to score, and it decreases after an appearance in which a relief pitcher prevents inherited runners from scoring.
This statistic takes into account:
-The number of outs there are when the reliever enters the game
-The bases of any inherited runners when the reliever enters the game
-Which of those inherited base runners score
R.R.A.® is scaled to yield numbers that are comparable to ERA. This allows you understand a relief pitcher's ability on a familiar scale, and more importantly, determine whether that pitcher plays better or worse in situations with inherited base runners.
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