It’s good to be young.

It’s better to be young ... and a pitcher in the major leagues these days.

Take a look at the ERA leaders in the game right now and most of them have one thing in common.

They all can barely grow a beard.

There’s only one hurler in the top five in the league in ERA older than 30 and that’s Hisashi Iwakuma at the ripe old age of 32.

There’s only two in the top 10 who are thirty-somethings. Adam Wainwright checks in at 31.

Get him a cane.

His teammate, Shelby Miller is 22. Patrick Corbin of the Diamondbacks is 23. The Mets’ resident savior Matt Harvey is 24. Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and the Pirates’ own Jeff Locke are 25. Clay Buchholz, the MLB leader, is 28.

Rarely has a group of pitchers dominated like this so early in their careers.

It’s the golden age of young pitching in the major leagues.

Gerrit Cole made his debut last week for the Pirates and the Mets showed they could have a filthy 1-2 punch at the top of their rotation for a decade when Zack Wheeler came up and made Atlanta hitters look silly for six innings Tuesday night.

The last time I remember this many young pitchers mowing down hitters at such a young age was in the 1980s.

To me, that was the other golden age of young pup pitchers making dazzling work of the rest of the league.

Fernando Mania was a big hit in Chavez Ravine in 1981. Valenzuela just turned 20 that year.

Bret Saberhagen was 21 when he won the Cy Young in 1985. He was an old man compared to his counterpart in the other league that year, Dwight Gooden, who was 19 when he had one of the greatest seasons for a pitcher since Bob Gibson.

Roger Clemens won the American League Cy Young and the MVP at the age of 23 the next season.

Most of those guys went on to have long and successful careers.

My bet is this crop of starting pitchers will also be good for a long time to come.

The only thing that could derail them is the current attitude about burgeoning arms.

Organizations have become so afraid of their prized pitching prospect blowing out his wing that they put him on strict inning and pitch counts.

Gooden threw 276 innings at the age of 20 in 1985. Strasburg was shut down after tossing 159 innings last year at 23.

The Mets are thinking about curtailing the workload for Harvey and Wheeler this season.

Who knows if that even works.

It only takes one pitch in one inning for all those Tommy John ligaments to snap like a rubber band. No one fretted over Valenzuela’s workload when he had wracked up 1,002 innings by the time he was 23.

No one worried about the wiring in Dave Stieb’s arm when he tossed 288 innings in 1982 at the age of 24.

That’s the way the game is now, though. At least pitching is getting younger.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.