Hello and welcome to the approach angle podcast, a pictureless podcast dedicated to teaching you all things baseball analytics. I'm your host, Nate Schwartz, joined as always by Director of Analytics, Kyle Bland. Kyle, how's your week been?

It's been a pretty good week, Nate. Yeah, just kind of enjoying it, going through some of our new, of the feedback for our picture of those player cards

always fun always soliciting you know ideas and suggestions from people on social media in our

discord so you know we're always iterating on those yeah the fun stuff that we may we may

touch on a little bit in this episode a little later but but today's episode is going to be a fun one.

It's going to kind of be a refresher course on the ERA discourse that's gone on for the last 10, 15 years.

But we're going to be taking a look at ERA specifically, as well as all of its estimators.

So we're going to go through the intricacies of things like FIP, expected FIP, expected ERA, Sierra, and some others,

talking about the difference really between your descriptive and predictive stats.

We'll close with some pitch level stats in PIGLIST's own PLA and a classic in strikeout minus walk rate.

And, you know, really kind of trying to show how much has to be accounted

for when it comes to estimating run prevention. And really, as we reach the time where most

stats are kind of stabilized and you have a good idea that, you know, one good outing or one bad

outing has really kind of dominated the guy's overall stats. We're at a good spot where you can kind of look at these at large

and get a good sense of what's happening in 2026.

But when I throw it, you know, when you throw up a player page

and see that ERA is kind of that first thing,

how much weight do you put on that before you look at anything else?

I mean, I put some weight to it.

Like, I think it tells a broad picture story that guys who do good things, get strikeouts,

don't allow hits, don't allow walks, are generally going to farewell by ERA,

and then vice for, and then the flip side is also true of

...