The real career ERA leader for the Seattle Mariners

From time to time, I’ll find myself looking around at the all-time stats for the Mariners. Whether it’s just because I love looking at Edgar’s stats, or being curious about where JP Crawford’s 2021 2B total ranked all-time for the Mariners, I’ll end up there every once in a while. Earlier this offseason, I noticed something that I swore was a mistake on the Mariners pitching records.

Have you taken a look at the Mariners career leaders in ERA? You would think that, with such a volatile stat like ERA, that there would be one person at the top of the list. Seriously, it should be pretty tough for there to be a tie there, right? I wouldn’t have thought that there would be two people tied at the top of the list.

Well, I was right. There isn’t a tie with two people at the top of the list. There is actually a four-way tie at the top of the list! What’s also funny to me is that all of them have thrown a no-hitter, with one of them throwing a perfect game.

The Mariners have a four-way tie for best career ERA on the team for qualified pitchers

James Paxton, Felix Hernandez, Randy Johnson, and Hisashi Iwakuma all have a 3.42 ERA. It’s mind-boggling every time I think about it. The fact that four people, all over 500 career innings, could come to the same number in ERA.  It’s about to get crazier too when you see just how close it is and was to the tie being broken.

What I wanted to do was break it down further. Push those decimal points out, and see who the true ERA leader was in Mariners team history. Let’s get started and check out how the tie was almost broken in 2021, and instead, was further cemented.

#4: James Paxton: Innings Pitched: 583.2, Earned Runs: 222, 3.423187 ERA

It was Paxton, but his lone start in 2021, he went 1.1 innings and gave up one run. This right here, this proves how insanely close this list is. Before he walked to the mound that day, Paxton had the best ERA in team history at 3.41557. When he left the mound that day after his injury, he was now 4th all-time with an ERA of 3.423187.

One scoreless inning. That’s all it would take for Paxton to jump back to first place with the Mariners. One out and he would go to third, two outs and he would stay put at third, and getting a third and final out would jump him past second and back into first. Hundreds of innings, even thousands for some of these pitchers, and it all comes down to a single out.

If that’s not baseball, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Of players to come through Seattle, Paxton has to be up near the top for players I really wanted to see stick around and stay healthy. He seemed like a great guy, was a lot of fun to watch, and could talk to birds.

He’s actually the Mariners career leader in FIP with a 3.13, T-2nd in adjusted ERA+ at 117, 2nd in WHIP, and 2nd in K/9. He was so close to becoming the team leader in ERA, but unless something changes and he comes back after being in Boston, Paxton will go down as 4th in ERA in the history of the Mariners.

#2: Felix Hernandez: Innings Pitched: 2729.2, Earned Runs: 1037, 3.419099 ERA

Oh, Felix. Watching him in his prime was a thing of beauty. Mariners fans all over know just how underappreciated he was because of the lack of run support the team was able to provide for him. Just check out this stat from a Schoenfield article over on ESPN back in 2016.

“It was the 45th start in which Hernandez allowed zero runs or one run and didn’t get credit for a win.”

That was only in 2016. That number made up 13.4% of his starts up to that point. In fact, in those 45 starts, Felix had a record of 0-5. It gets worse. He had 118 games where he threw a quality start and didn’t get the win, going 0-42 with a 2.19 ERA in those starts. He even threw something called an “Ultra-Quality Start” (UQ) in a mind-boggling 43% of his starts.

Think about some of it for a minute. Felix had 418 starts. 258 Quality starts, 180 UQ starts, and his record was only 169-136. Teams win 68% of the time a pitcher has a quality start, so just in this quality starts Felix should’ve had 175 wins. Then you still have the other 160 starts. Give him wins in 40% of those games, and Felix gets to 239 wins. Maybe you think the numbers are skewed low or high, but we can all agree Felix had awful run support.

Felix through 199 games from 2009-2014, and only had 86 wins to go along with his ERA of 2.73. He should’ve won way more than that. Like 40+ games more. Yeah, on a normal team with run support, Felix would’ve won 20+ a year, especially throwing seven innings a night.

Does this have a ton to do with the ERA conversation for the Mariners? No, not really. Felix was dominant though, and he deserved better. With just 1.2 innings more, Felix could take over the best ERA in team history. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, which leads us to the true career leader in ERA for the Mariners…

#1: Randy Johnson: Innings Pitched: 1838.1, Earned Runs: 698, 3.417226 ERA

Talk about a candidate for What-if Wednesdays. Can you imagine what could’ve been if Randy Johnson would’ve stayed with the Mariners and put together something similar to what he did with the Diamondbacks?

I’m not saying he would’ve won a title with the Mariners (again, maybe we could cover it in a what-if article) but The Big Unit turned into an entirely different animal once he left Seattle.

He got to Seattle back in 1989 during the Langston trade. He was a menace on the mound, but was pretty wild. From his first full season in 1990-1992, Johnson led the league in walks with 416 in 631.1 innings, for a rate of 5.9/9. He still had just a 3.79 ERA over that span, but starting in 1993, things would change and you would see him start to turn into the truly dominant presence we remember him to be.

He never had over 100 walks in a season again, dropping his rate from 1993-1997 to 3.3/9. He would also strikeout over 290 hitters three different times in that span, and post a K rate of 11.6/9. His ERA (2.86), FIP (2.82), and WHIP (1.102) were all incredible during that stretch and saw him turn into a true Ace on the mound.

If not for a rough start to 1998, where he had a 4.33 ERA (but just a 3.35 FIP), Randy easily would’ve had the best team ERA in history at 3.33. Alas, we can only cut stats when we are trying to prove a point, not when it comes to the record book. If he would’ve given up one more run, he would actually fall back to 3rd. For now, and the foreseeable future, Randy Johnson takes the rightful title as the Mariners all-time ERA leader in their history.

Regardless of which one of these four pitchers are your favorite, or which one you would prefer to see on the mound, the Mariners were lucky to have all of them. Now, you have a random bit of sports knowledge as well to try and stump people when it comes to trivia.