Analyzing the Pirates’ arms with “FIP”
Welcome to the first edition of Bucs by Numbers. Here you will find many numbers and, hopefully, some context to go with them as they pertain to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
In today’s baseball climate, advanced stats rule the day. Acronyms buzz around fans like ever-present insects on a sticky summer day. Some have been with us for what seems like forever — ERA, AVG, RBI — and yet some are newer additions to the hardball lexicon.
What the heck is wOBA or wRC+ anyway? DRS and UZR? WAR? What is that good for?
(Sorry, I could not resist the reference.)
Every other week, this column will highlight one such “fancy stat” and put it in laymen’s terms. Then, we will look at how the Pittsburgh Pirates measure up in that metric.
We start today with a figure that many hope to see replace the tried-and-true ERA (Earned Run Average) as a better way to judge pitching performance.
FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, aims to distill pitching performance into one easy-to-digest number, while removing such factors as home run friendly ballparks, stolen bases, team defense and even good old fashioned luck.
I will spare you the exact formula to save your sanity.
After those deductions, what remains within FIP to judge a pitcher on is that which is more directly within his own control: strikeouts, walks, hit batters and home runs allowed.
You may be wondering why hits are not included as a black mark against pitchers. Hitters hit and pitcher’s pitch, after all, so why shouldn’t the victor in that battle be rewarded — or for a pitcher, penalized — in the stat column?
The plain truth is that, despite a batter’s best efforts to spray the ball to all fields with just the right placement, there is a great deal of luck involved. Be it a funky hop to a shortstop, or a screamer down the line that caroms just fair, wacky things can happen when a hitter puts bat to ball. With pitchers not receiving credit for plain-Jane outs, this exclusion evens out.
To many, including your author, framing FIP in such a way provides a more accurate representation of true effectiveness.
FIP is easy to read. In fact, it has a format that reads identically to ERA. Thus, if Doug Drabek had an ERA of 1.50 in 1991 along with a FIP of 1.50, you could accurately make the statement that he was a very good pitcher in that season, regardless of luck or other factors.
Of course, finding that singularity between FIP and ERA is unheard of. The closer the two are to each other, the more accurately a pitcher is judged.
There are other ways to read FIP against ERA. If a pitcher has a 2.15 ERA but a 4.50 FIP, you could state that a pitcher ‘outperformed his FIP.” An ERA of 3.50 against a FIP of 1.75 would indicate a very unlucky pitcher.
Centering our focus back to the current-day Pittsburgh Pirates, we can use FIP to glean a few nuggets about the Bucs pitchers.
If we look some of the big names in the Pirates’ rotation and bullpen, we see some overachievers, some underachievers and two that we cannot make sense of.
First, to no surprise, Jameson Taillon (2.13 ERA/3.72 FIP) is the best example of a pitcher outperforming his FIP. By all accounts, Taillon should look more like someone with less than 25 starts in the majors than he currently does. Credit his ability to induce soft contact — usually a groundball out — as the main catalyst in doing so.
Is this to say that Taillon is a bad pitcher because his FIP is higher than his ERA? No, certainly not. It is more indicative of his ability to overcome rough patches and focus on getting the next man out.
Ivan Nova (2.00 ERA /3.05 FIP) is the club’s steadiest starter, while Gerrit Cole (3.60 ERA/3.94 FIP) is rounding into form after a rough opening start against the Red Sox.
Chad Kuhl (6.63 ERA/4.13 FIP) and Tyler Glasnow (7.98 ERA/4.61 FIP) are both head-scratchers. A case for a bad bout of luck can be made for Kuhl, but in Glasnow’scase it is actually more surprising that he does not have a higher FIP, as walks are penalizing to a pitcher within the FIP formula.
When judging a bullpen arm, FIP gets a bit trickier, as a relative lack of innings — especially in the season’s early going — can inflate numbers that would otherwise be stout.
Nevertheless, Felipe Rivero’s ERA of 0.66 outperforms his FIP of 2.83, while newcomer Daniel Hudson is the unluckiest guy in the pen, with a FIP of 3.18 betrayed by his 5.59 ERA.
A polarizing arm for his up-and-down play at times in 2016, Tony Watson’s 5.87 FIP benefits from some luck (and timely double plays), as his ERA of 0.96 suggests.
FIP is not perfect. No statistic truly is. Baseball is a glorious game chiefly due the human element and drama seen on a nightly basis.
However, the next time that you are deeply engaged on the “Is Gerrit Cole an Ace?” debate, you will now have a bit more ammo by way of utilizing FIP rather than ERA.