A Weird Aspect of the History of America’s Pastime

With the playoffs upon us, I have taken it upon myself to talk about some of the most intriguing moments in baseball history. So, today we are going over Harry Heitmann. Baseball is filled with many interesting characters that cover the record book, and Heitman is no exception. He has instituted something that has not been repeated since, the infinite ERA. For those who do not know what ERA is, it is a statistic in baseball to calculate the average amount of earned runs a pitcher has allowed in a game. It is calculated with the following formula: earned runs/innings pitched times nine. Since pitchers can be pulled in the middle of an inning, one recorded out equals ⅓ of an inning. So back to Harry. Harry Heitmann was a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers and got to pitch one game before being shipped out with the Navy. He started the game and recorded four hits and a couple runs, but he did not record an out. He was then pulled from the game. This left him with the highest ERA ever recorded in a career, ∞.