Origins
Henry Chadwick is credited with first devising the statistic, which caught on as a measure of pitching effectiveness after relief pitching came into vogue in the 1900s. Prior to 1900 – and, in fact, for many years afterward – pitchers were routinely expected to pitch a complete game, and their win-loss record was considered sufficient in determining their effectiveness.
Some criterion was needed to capture the apportionment of earned-run responsibility for a pitcher in games that saw contributions from other pitchers for the same team. Since pitchers have primary responsibility to put opposing batters out, they must assume responsibility when a batter they do not retire at the plate moves to base, and eventually reaches home, scoring a run. A pitcher is assessed an earned run for each earned run scored by a batter (or pinch-runner) who reached base while batting against that pitcher. After pitchers like James Otis Crandall and Charlie Hall made names for themselves as relief specialists, gauging a pitcher's effectiveness became more difficult using the traditional method of tabulating wins and losses. The National League first kept official earned run average statistics in 1912 (the statistic was called "Heydler's statistic" for a while, after then-NL secretary John Heydler), with the American League following suit afterward.
Recently written baseball encyclopedias display ERAs for earlier years, but these were computed retrospectively. Negro League pitchers are often rated by RA, or total runs allowed, since the statistics available for Negro League games did not always distinguish between earned and unearned runs.
Read more about this topic: Earned Run Average
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