Yankees broadcaster Jim Kaat continues to be one of my favorites. He has a way of packaging extremely intelligent commentary in such an understated and down-to-earth tone. During last night's game, he injected some reason into what continues to be statistics overload during baseball broadcasts.

A graphic appeared on the screen showing earned run averages of the pitcher. The ERAs were grouped by innings. First was innings 1-4, in which the pitcher's ERA was low. Then innings 5-6, in which the ERA was also pretty low. Then innings 7-9, in which the ERA suddenly spiked.

Kaat saw the weakness in this statistic immediately and explained it. If you're losing steam and give up one run in the 7th inning before being taken out, your ERA becomes 9.00 for innings 7-9. Therefore, the spike is misleading. Absolutely correct. If you give up one run in the 7th inning, then you gave up 1 run in 1 inning from innings 7 though 9. Since ERA is earned runs yielded per nine innings, your ERA jumps to 9.00.

Way to go, Jim Kaat. Fantastic. Enough with the stats.