The Twins' pitching staff ran a 4.26 ERA in 2024. That ranked just 21st in baseball, and it was one of the reasons they missed the playoffs. In fact, here’s the list of playoff teams that had a worse ERA than the Twins: nobody. Not a single playoff team had a worse ERA than the Twins. Want to play in October? You need to pitch well. However, it’s not quite that simple.
As our knowledge of the game’s intricacies has advanced, ERA has fallen from its place of prominence. A wide variety of ERA estimators attempt to account for factors outside the pitcher’s control—defense, batted ball luck, sequencing, park factors—in order to get a better idea of what the pitcher actually did right or wrong. Fielding-independent pitching (FIP) looks only at the three true outcomes of walks, homers, and strikeouts (as well as the long-slighted fourth true outcome, hit-by-pitches; what could be truer than throwing a baseball directly into the flesh of a fellow human being?). FIP has long been known to be more predictive of a pitcher’s future performance than ERA. xFIP takes things a step further. It replaces a pitcher’s actual home run total with the number of dingers that Statcast thinks they deserved to give up.
I bring all this up because if you look at these estimators, you’ll see that they tell a very different story about the Twins staff (and season) than their ERA does. The table below shows how the team fared according to various stats. The first row shows the raw numbers, and the second shows their rank among all MLB teams. Calling the difference stark would really be underselling things.
|
Metric
|
ERA
|
FIP
|
xFIP
|
DRA
|
SIERA
|
ERA-
|
FIP-
|
xFIP-
|
DRA-
|
|
Raw
|
4.26
|
3.84
|
3.83
|
4.14
|
3.65
|
106
|
94
|
94
|
93
|
|
Rank
|
21
|
7
|
5
|
4
|
3
|
22
|
6
|
4
|
4
|
Nearly every advanced metric thinks that the Twins had a top-five pitching staff in 2024. Top five! How did they end up ranked 21st in ERA?
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