zbhargrove
Well-known member
This might be too pedantic a point to be worth making, but I would point out that ERA is not a strictly observational accounting of objective facts. "Earned runs" inherently require a subjective judgement from an official scorer, and then you get into inherited runners and how they're assigned. ERA is more results based than FIP or xFIP, but "Pitcher X has an ERA half a run below Pitcher Y" is not the equivalent of saying "Player X has five more home runs than Player Y." You're still making certain judgements and projections. They just happen to be judgements and projections that we've been making in baseball for a hundred years, so we tend to take them for granted.
This is also a fair point