Wild Pitch
WPA pitch too high, low, or wide for the catcher to handle with ordinary effort, allowing a runner to advance, charged to the pitcher.
A wild pitch is charged when a pitch is errant enough that the catcher could not reasonably have stopped it, and a runner advances because of it. The mirror image of a passed ball: same outcome on the field, different player at fault.
It requires an advance. A pitch that skips to the backstop with the bases empty is just a ball; there is no wild pitch to record because nothing happened.
In youth baseball wild pitches are among the most common ways runners move, particularly at the age where kid pitch begins. A pitcher can walk nobody and still concede several bases an inning to pitches in the dirt.
Unlike a passed ball, runs scoring on a wild pitch are earned, because the pitcher created the situation.
Bleacher Notes charges the wild pitch to the pitcher and treats any resulting run as earned, keeping ERA consistent with the official scoring rules.
Is a run scored on a wild pitch earned?
Yes. Because the pitcher is responsible for the wild pitch, any run that scores as a result counts against their earned run average. This is the opposite of a passed ball, where the run is unearned.
Is a wild pitch an error?
No. Wild pitches are recorded in their own category and do not count as fielding errors against the pitcher.
Let the scorebook keep itself.
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