Earned Date Average

So you want your earned run average (ERA) to be low. Self-explantory-wise, that's one that could go either way.

I know I've defined ERA in a previous post- a pitching statistic calculated by dividing earned runs allowed by innings pitched and forecasting over 9 innings. So much other baseball information is swimming around my head, though, that ERA with its vague name - you would think earning runs would be a good thing- hasn't sunk in yet.

Maybe after lasts night it will be easier. Daisuke Matsuzaka pitched a no-hitter into the eighth inning, when Marco Scutaro was unable to catch a broken-bat hit by Phillies' Juan Carlos. This morning, sports analysts are abuzz about Dice-K's ERA with and without this season's one 5-hit and one 6-hit inning.

With the bad innings, Matsuzaka's ERA is 5.76; disregarding those innings it is 2.6.

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, and we went out to dinner to celebrate. It was the second date we went on in our first year of marriage. So let's say our earned date average is 18, the number of dates we will go on over nine years of marriage.

If we took out a few bad dates (say Dave didn't get me flowers- ha, that would make our lifetime EDA 0.00001) the EDA would be less.

And now I'm realizing that while this might help me remember ERA (even if I lost all my readers in the process), it is a bad analogy. I said in the beginning of the post that a low ERA is good, whereas a low EDA would be bad.

Remember that, Dave!