FIP is a Garbage Statistic

Just a casual fan that got pissed because he doesn’t understand sabermetrics.

Don’t lump all of us in with this Martian.

That’s really really good for the epitome of a contact pitcher.

But as others have said above, it just seems like the writer of this post doesn’t entirely understand WHY these other metrics (FIP, xFIP, tERA, SIERA, etc.) are often more reflective of a player’s individual performance than ERA.

It’s too bad that he’s not really participating in the discussion that he managed to create, though, because a lot of his problems with FIP could probably be assuaged by learning from some of the very smart people who comment here.

http://www.sbnation.com/users/Rays125

and it’s about FIP, I’ll just throw it in here. But here it is: do pitchers on teams with better defenses trend towards having better or worse FIP’s or is there no correlation? Same for any other stat that attempts to completely separate pitcher performance from fielding. The reason obviously being that we would prefer no correlation (I assume).

But it’s not that it’s a junk stat, but rather that it will overrate some pitchers and underrate others. While on average BABIP doesn’t have much of a correlation, it is a repeatable skill for certain individuals. Thus, you end up with some guys like Andy Sonnanstine (who has a higher than average BABIP year in and year out, this SSS year notwithstanding, for what I think are pretty obvious reasons) who get overrated by FIP, and some others like Armando Galarraga (off the top of my head), who seems to be able to pitch to weak contact, who get underrated. A guy who has some movement and deception on his pitches, but not enough to generate swings and misses at a high rate, probably gets hurt a bit, since his pitches are likely to be hit less solidly.

But if one can reason that a pitcher has a certain amount of control over whether his pitches miss bats, then one could also reason that a pitcher should also have a certain amount of control over whether his pitches partially miss bats, inducing a lot of foul balls and weak contact.

All that said, FIP certainly has its uses (and on the balance is probably a better stat than ERA), and definitely has much higher predictive qualities than ERA.

is that FIP does not take into account the kind of balls that are hit back. It only takes into account the things that the final result is in the pitcher’s control, which are BB’s, K’s, and HR rate. Now, admittedly, he phrased it in a bit of a confrontational way and I think thats why everyone’s up in arms, but he has a valid point. Pitchers do have control over at the very least, GB rate, which pitchers are consistent in year-in and year-out with (Brandon Webb has never suddenly given up all FB’s in a season), and from the limited amount of knowledge I have, there is an argument whether pitchers can control pop-ups as well (I recall Jon Rauch being noted as particularly adept an inducing them). So, I don’t think FIP is completely a “garbage stat” as it is pretty useful in evaluating pitchers minus their defense, I dont think it tells us the whole story, like Raysfan125 is saying, if I’m getting him right. I think in order to truly get at a pitcher’s worth, you have to look at the various batted ball results (GB, FB, LD rates).