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List of Major League Baseball career ERA leaders

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ6577611 ↗
Source-derived summary

In baseball statistics, earned run average (ERA) is the mean of earned runs given up by a pitcher per nine innings pitched (i.e., the traditional length of a game). It is calculated by dividing the number of earned runs allowed by the number of innings pitched and multiplying by nine. Runs resulting from defensive errors (including pitchers' defensive errors) are recorded as unearned runs and are not used to determine earned run average.

This is a list of the top 100 players in career earned run average, who have thrown at least 1,000 innings.

Ed Walsh holds the major league earned run average record at 1.816. Addie Joss (1.887) and Jim Devlin (1.896) are the only other pitchers with a career earned run average under 2.000.

Key

List

Stats updated as of September 25, 2026.

See also

Baseball statistics

List of Major League Baseball annual ERA leaders

Notes

References

External links

"Career Leaders & Records for Earned Run Average". Baseball-Reference.com.

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Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2026—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, Major and League can be independently traced.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of Major League Baseball career ERA leaders” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.