Robert Stock had some time on his hands on Thursday, and so the New York Mets right-handed pitcher opened his X (formerly Twitter) account to answer some questions from fans.
One fan asked Stock about his ERA. That fan may have regretted the question.
It actually all started because Stock wrote this about the role that analytics should play in baseball:
"This type of thinking (incurious, nonsensical, uninformed) has made its way out of baseball for one reason and one reason only – it loses baseball games. One by one every organization has had to adapt to superior strategies and analytics in a bid to win."
That's when a user asked Stock about his own ERA: "What do the analytics say about your ERA? Or is that stat too old school?"
Stock wasn't going to take the sass involved in that question.
Of course, the fan was trying to insult Stock, whose ERA for the season is 5.88.
To be fair, Stock is coming off an outing in which he went 5.1 innings and didn't allow a run, so he's probably feeling like he's trending in the right direction, despite a tough season for the Mets as a whole.
Anyway, this is what Stock had to say in his response:
"Analytics say that a pitcher's ERA is highly correlated to their ability to prevent runs, but is a volatile stat over short periods. There are other stats that are much less volatile with equal ability to predict how good a pitcher is at preventing runs, but anybody who is asking me about this in 2026 (instead of reading the plethora of articles freely available online) is likely uninterested in learning."
It feels like Stock won this argument.
He does have a point. Most intense baseball fans recognize at this point that ERA isn't the best indicator of a pitcher's success, at least not all the time.
Does that mean Stock is actually an ace in disguise? Not necessarily. But he makes a reasonable point that would be true whether he was dominating at the MLB level or not.
A fan followed up by asking Stock the logical question: What does the Mets pitcher look at instead of ERA?
"It's basically stuff metrics and k/bb percentages," Stock replied.
Stuff metrics are numbers that examine a pitcher's specific arsenal and the effectiveness of each of his individual pitches.
K/BB percentages analyze strikeouts versus walks, because those are two things a pitcher has in his control, as opposed to results on batted balls put into play.
For what it's worth, this season, Stock's 5.88 ERA is greatly bettered by his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), which is 4.02. That suggests that Stock has been unlucky, or that he hasn't gotten great help from his defense.
Maybe he has every right to be salty. The guys behind him, the numbers suggest, aren't getting the job done when he's on the mound. That can certainly be a frustrating existence for a pitcher.
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