I needed a break from writing a paper for my corporate ethics class, so I looked at some numbers. I couldn't find anything that broke it down by inning, but Yahoo breaks it down by number of pitches. For pitches 1-15, our starter's ERA looks like this: (Player, 2004, 2005) Maddux, 2.93, 6.67 Zambrano, 4.50, 9.00 Prior, 7.02, 5.40 Wood, 2.51, 2.25 Rusch, 4.56, 6.00 Clearly, with the exception of Wood, our starters as a whole are not very good in the first inning. What's the cause? Too few warm up pitches? Too many? Bad coaching?