Unearned runs

[Holy Bull]

Made a bet on Toronto/Roy Halladay today and after Halladay gave up an unearned run, I looked and saw that he has given up an extrodinarily high amount of unearned runs this year (and in his career) especially for a pitcher of his quality. Toronto defense as a whole doesn't look significantly worse than other teams.

Haven't really incorporated unearned runs in my handicapping which is probably a bad idea so I thought I'd ask here. Other than team errors, has anyone found any correlation between # of unearned runs a pitcher allows and another stat, maybe opposing batting average or walks allowed or K ratio maybe.

[ChuckyTheGoat]

Don't have a great solution for you. But maybe use Runs/gm as your defensive indicator. Forget about ERA. Runs/gm is the true stat, as it looks at pitching AND defense.

[SwampHog]

I imagine that a pitcher that induces more ground balls would tend to elicit more errors from his defense.

[deepsouth]

I believe I recall reading that a pitcher's Past Runs Allowed are a better predictor of both a) Future Runs Allowed and b) Future Earned Runs Allowed.

So if you're going to handicap based on runs/inning or runs/game, RA is probably going to work better than ERA. But I don't really know the answer to your question about what's correlated with unearned runs ... my guess would be that (as SwampHog suggests), groundball pitchers give up more unearned runs than flyball pitchers.

[Revere14]

What about errors by the pitcher himself? He is part of the defense too.

Revere14