Mariano Rivera’s Career 2.21 E.R.A. places him at the # 11 spot and the only active player among the 20 Best MLB Career E.R.A.’a of All Time.
What are the odds against the chance that any manager will ever have a group like this one to pick his starting rotation or entire pitching staff from? – I’d say they must be somewhere at 1,000,000 to 1 against the possibility, but it’s still fun to dream. (I’m no oddsmaker. It may be closer to a trillion to one.)
Please note that the only active player on the list is not even a starter, but the someday to be Hall of Fame one-big-pitch nemesis that is still the name we mostly think of when we consider the main guy in history who stands out as the consummate closer, the one and only Mariano Rivera.
Because of changes in the game and the role of pitching, very few of the career E.R.A. leaders among the top 1,000 names are active in the game today. At the # 11 spot, Mariano Rivera and his 2.21 mark is the only active player in the “20 Best” group until we move down and beyond to Adam Wainwright at the # 186 spot with a 3.08 mark. As you will quickly see in the Baseball Almanac excerpted chart used here, there have been only three men, all from the dead ball era, that have registered career E.R.A. records below the 2.00 mark. These guys played at a time in which just about all of our current E.R.A. seasonal leaders would have been seen as doing inferior work by the standards of those Turn of the 20th Century times.
Once again, thanks to Baseball Almanac for the ready availability of those handsome and provocative all time record displays.
| Earned Run Average All Time Leaders Top 20/ Baseball Almanac |
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| Name | ERA (Raw ERA) | Rank |
| Ed Walsh | 1.82 (1.816) | 1 |
| Addie Joss | 1.89 (1.887) | 2 |
| Jim Devlin | 1.89 (1.890) | 3 |
| Jack Pfiester | 2.02 (2.024) | 4 |
| Joe Wood | 2.03 (2.030) | 5 |
| Mordecai Brown | 2.06 (2.057) | 6 |
| John Ward | 2.10 (2.102) | 7 |
| Christy Mathewson | 2.13 (2.133) | 8 |
| Rube Waddell | 2.16 (2.161) | 9 |
| Walter Johnson | 2.17 (2.167) | 10 |
| Mariano Rivera | 2.21 (2.214) | 11 |
| Jake Weimer | 2.23 (2.231) | 12 |
| Orval Overall | 2.23 (2.233) | 13 |
| Tommy Bond | 2.25 (2.250) | 14 |
| Will White | 2.28 (2.276) | 15 |
| Babe Ruth | 2.28 (2.277) | 16 |
| Ed Reulbach | 2.28 (2.284) | 17 |
| Jim Scott | 2.30 (2.298) | 18 |
| Reb Russell | 2.33 (2.334) | 19 |
| Andy Coakley | 2.35 (2.350) | 20 |
| Eddie Plank | 2.35 (2.350) | |
Tags: Adam Wainwright, Mariano Rivera, Top 20 Career E.R.A.'s
The Pecan Park Eagle 
August 31, 2012 at 3:08 pm |
Interesting that with other than Rivera, all of the top 10-12 pitchers on the list began their careers between 1897 & 1908 (a defining trait of the type of baseball played in this era?) with the exception of two: Jim Devlin and John Montgomery Ward, who each began his career in 1878.
As our Vintage Baseball team, the Houston Babies play 1860’s rules; which involves underhand tosses similar to Slo-pitch softball. Whem did the advent of overhanded deliveries
begin where a pitcher would actually have a major effect upon the performance of a hitter and the calculation of ERA’s as a stat begin?
August 31, 2012 at 3:16 pm |
Not only was the ball “dead” but balls stayed in play long after they had been scuffed, shined and spat upon. Games were played sometimes in twilight conditions and the players then were almost entirely anglos.
It may be my age but, IMO, the great pitching era was the 1960s when hurlers like Gibson, Marichal and Koufax ruled. Pitching was so dominant that the game’s poobahs lowered the mound and did other things to put more offense in the game and where, no doubt, the seed of the abomination called the designated hitter came from.
The lack of any pitchers from the 60s on this list illustrates to me how unfair it is to compare the “dead ball era” with any that came after it and the inclusion of Rivera is more a statistical anomoly brought about by pitching 70 innings a year really really well when the starters throw 250-300 innings.
September 1, 2012 at 1:29 am |
Walter Johnson’s career ERA through the 1919 season was 1.65 (over 4000 innings). If he’d retired then, he’d be number 1 on this list, but he wouldn’t have had as good a career and the Nationals wouldn’t have won their 1924 and 1925 pennants. Which points out the folly of judging pitchers by ERA rather than earned runs prevented (or some such datum).
September 2, 2012 at 10:51 pm |
Amazing to think that Babe Ruth ranks number 16 all-time in ERA. Of course, if you look at ERA+ (ERA adjusted for park and league), Ruth drops to # 100 – which still places him among the premier pitchers in history, a smidgeon below Juan Marichal and tied with Eddie Planck and Bob Feller, and ahead of such HOFers or future HOFers as Don Drysdale, Iron Man McGinnity, Rollie Fingers, Bob Lemon, Charles Radbourn, Warren Spahn, Bert Blyleven, Tom Glavine, Ted Lyons, Gaylord Perry, Vic Willis, Dennis Eckersley, Jim Bunning, Steve Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins, Phil Niekro, Robin Roberts, Mickey Welch, Chief Bender, Waite Hoyt, Nolan Ryan, Catfish Hunter and others.
Meanwhile, Mariano Rivera leaps to the top of the ERA+ list by an astonishing margin.