Triple ERA

Sometimes ideas are complicated.

Sometimes the formulation of ideas can become sticky.

Sometimes the computations needed to put these ideas in motion can cause nausea, disorientation and the feeling that you should have paid much more attention in school.

Triple ERA, or TERA, is nothing like that.

If you can add and divide, and I’m sure you can, it’s pretty simple to compute. Would have to think that the concept is pretty straight forward too. Let’s dig into it.

THE IDEA

ERA has flaws but it’s engrained in our baseball psyche. It ain’t going anywhere, and we totally understand what it represents (well most of us do).

Component ERA, or ERC, uses hits and walks instead of earned runs to speak to the performance of a pitcher. It’s read the same way as ERA. In essence, it speaks to the balls that are put in play by batters and tries to minimize the reliance on bullpens and defense.

Defense Independent Pitching Stat, or DIPS, says that a pitcher’s skill level has little to no bearing on whether or not a batted ball becomes a hit. Further research has refined this position, but there is still a lot of truth in it. DIPS is the precursor for measure like FIP and SIERA.

All three measures have their pluses and minuses. Why not try and find a way to work around those weaknesses while retaining the strengths that each offers? Seems like a plausible thought process to follow to me. What about you?

THE FORMULA

Triple ERA, or TERA, is easy-peasy to figure out. Since I “invented” it, and since I’m a simple man, I thought it would be best to present something that takes away all the hocus-pocus of many of the fancy-pants measures out there and just gets down to it. Down and dirty, in the mud style. Simple.

(ERA+ERC+DIPS) / 3

Each measure, warts and all, is given one third of equation. None overwhelms the other. They all share equally. Heck, TERA is the perfect socialist equation. I never thought of myself as a socialist before, but guess I am.

THE 2016 LEADERS

Since ERA itself is volatile, and therefore any measure based upon it would share that trait, I’ve chosen to only highlight the pitchers that qualified for the ERA title last season (162 innings pitched). Relivers, in particular, can have the variance of ERA crush them (three bad outings out of 50 over the course of the season, can cause a variation of upward of ¾ of a run or whatever). The more innings we review with any ERA based measure the more likely we will be able to draw from that sample size an accurate picture. With that, here are the TERA leaders for 2016.

My breakout star of the 2016 season, Kyle Hendricks, crushed it last year, all the measures agree. DIPS almost caused him to fall out of the top spot in TERA though as Noah Syndergaard’s mark in that category nearly allowed him to close the overall gap and take over the #1 TERA spot. Jon Lester, like his Cubs teammate Hendricks, had much bigger fans in ERA and ERC than DIPS. The same can be said for their other teammate, Jake Arrieta. Of the three arms of the Cubs, Arrieta’s TERA most closely matched his raw ERA.

Tanner Roark was the lowest ranked arm on the list if you use ERA as the guide meaning he was the lowest ranked hurler with a raw ERA in the 2’s.

Marco Estrada’s up and down trio of numbers speaks to why I’m so concerned with recommending him every year. His skills don’t support the final results. He was the only hurler in the top-25 who had a mark in the 4’s in any of the three categories.

Here is the rest of the leaderboard.