Zack Greinke In ‘The Peripheral Disconnect’
Pitchers whose ERAs and estimators disagree are extremely interesting to analyze. On one hand, their signature run prevention mark might appear toward the top of leaderboards while the underlying numbers aren’t as fruitful. On the other side of the spectrum are pitchers like Zack Greinke, who, as Chris Cwik pointed out yesterday, has a vast disconnect between his ERA and FIP. In fact, it’s been that way since the first week of May when he came off of the disabled list.
His 2.63 FIP and 2.12 xFIP suggest that the newly-minted Brewers starter has been one of the best in the league. But Greinke’s actual 5.63 ERA is closer to the bottom than the top, and is three runs higher than his adjusted marks. One of the more popular stats here is E-F, a sortable number that measures the gap between ERA and FIP. Pitchers with a large separation are expected to regress in some fashion, because it is incredibly rare for anyone to finish with a huge disagreement between those two data points.
I thought about taking that concept a bit further and calculating the difference between ERA and xFIP, since the latter metric is a better predictor of future earned run average than its predecessor. This makeshift ‘E-X’ number would be measurable from 2002-now, and it piqued my curiosity to see which pitchers had the largest such gaps in that span.
Granted, the separation in Greinke’s numbers is unlikely to remain as substantial as the season wears on, but he was more of an introductory device here as opposed to a player being compared — obviously it wouldn’t be accurate to compare his numbers through two months to those amassed over full seasons for other hurlers.
Looking at pitchers whose ERAs exceeded their xFIPs since 2002, here are the guys with the biggest ERA-xFIP deltas:
Carlos Silva (2008), 1.88 E-X
Silva’s numbers looked terrible above the surface: a 4-15 record and a 6.46 ERA. Beneath those numbers, however, was a 61 percent strand rate and .342 BABIP. He managed a K/BB above 2.0 without striking anyone out, and induced grounders on 44 percent of his balls in play. His ERA estimators by no means suggested he was an upper echelon pitcher, but rather that he was closer to league average than the bottom of the pile. The 1.88 delta between his 6.46 ERA and 4.58 xFIP is the largest in this span.
Ricky Nolasco (2009), 1.83 E-X
Can’t say his name is shocking to see here. If I were to have polled you prior to revealing the list, Nolasco and Javier Vazquez‘s names were likely to pop up. Nolasco tossed 185 innings in 2009 with a 5.06 ERA, despite a 9.5 K/9, 2.1 BB/9, 3.35 FIP and 3.23 xFIP. Unlike Silva, the estimators here suggest that Nolasco was one of the best in the league, and his 4.3 WAR in 2009 bears that out.
Unfortunately, nothing has really changed for Nolasco, who continues to be one of the more frustrating pitchers in baseball to follow, and potentially the Vazquez of this generation.
Nate Robertson (2008), 1.73 E-X
His numbers almost directly mirror those of Silva: a 6.35 ERA and 4.62 xFIP in 168 2/3 innings. Robertson struck more batters out but issued walks at a greater frequency. This issue seems to have plagued him forever, as he has a career .304 BABIP, 68 percent strand rate, 5.01 ERA and 4.45 xFIP.
James Shields (2010), 1.63 E-X
Finally, an example of a guy who actually met the expectations of his xFIP in the following season. Last year, Shields put up an ugly 5.18 ERA, but struck out 8.3 batters per nine in the tougher American League, while producing a 4.2 K/BB ratio. He finished the season with a 3.55 xFIP, and while his numbers are regression-bound this season (in the other direction, given his .256 BABIP and 82 percent strand rate), his peripherals have largely remained the same and his performance is more in line with what those underlying numbers suggest.
Jose Lima (2005), 1.63 E-X
Once again, we alternate the terrible made to look closer to league average with the ‘meh’ made to look solid. In this case, however, we’re looking at the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. Lima might not have been as bad as a 6.99 ERA suggests, but his 5.36 xFIP wasn’t exactly inspiring. He makes the top five because even someone with peripherals as unsightly as his couldn’t be expected to sustain a 7.00 ERA pace.
What stood out when looking at the 870 pitcher-seasons with 150 innings included in the span was how so many of those with an ERA at least a run greater than their xFIPs fell in line with Silva and Robertson as opposed to Nolasco and Shields. Of the 42 whose E-X was 1.00+, the weighted averages included a 5.49 ERA, 4.54 FIP and 4.22 xFIP.
The only pitcher in the span with a sub-4.00 ERA to also have a delta of one or more runs is Curt Schilling, back in 2002, when he pitched a 3.23 ERA, 2.40 FIP and 2.22 xFIP in 259 1/3 frames.
Perhaps this speaks to the notion that better pitchers are less likely to see large disconnects between their ERA and estimators. Because of their skillsets, it is less likely for a fluky BABIP or strand rate to influence run-prevention. For every Cole Hamels‘ 2009 there are likely double-digit Cole Hamels‘ 2010 replicas. Either way, there is no way that Greinke’s current three-run separation persists without his shattering the E-X record. Considering he has an 11.6 K/9 and 1.7 BB/9, it seems much more likely that his ERA improves than it does that his estimators will materially suffer.
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It seems to me like the DIPS theory doesn’t work as well for really awful pitchers. I’m not an expert by any means, but intuitively, there are going to be pitchers that are bad enough that they can maintain awful BABIPs and never strand runners because they can never get a batter out. It seems that this, albeit small, study supports this notion. Am I right?
Also, according to his peripherals, James Shields is pitching WAY better than last season. His xFIP is 2.90, compared to 3.55 the year before. Yeah, he’ll likely regress a little, but it seems that in addition to some good luck, he has transformed into an elite pitcher.
FIP isn’t a DIPS stat.
FIP is directly influenced by BABIP, because its denominator is IP instead of PA
Interesting. So because IP is influenced by BABIP, and IP is in the FIP formula, it’s not DIPS. I’ve never heard that before. Well still, I don’t think that takes away from my point. I’m just saying that DIPS theory probably assumes, like “yes” says below me, that the quality of competition is normally distributed. And even if FIP isn’t entirely independent of defense, it is mostly (and is according to the glossary here) so I would still say the small study here is relevant.
You can’t be DIPS (Defense Independant Pitching Statistic), when part of your stat is directly influenced by defense.
In a round about way, IP is a product of strikeouts and babip.
The biggest problem, is that having a HIGH BABIP (IE, allowing more hits) reduces your IP, and raises your K/9.
A)For example, if you have a pitcher who K’s 20% of the batters he faces, and has a BABIP of .750, through 10 batters, he’s going to strike out 2, give up 6 hits, and get 2 outs on BIP. (no homers or walks)
He’ll have a K/9 of 13.5. Have pitched 1.1 innings.
B)Now, the same pitcher has a lucky day, and has a BABIP of .250. (no homers or walks). He’ll strike out 2, give up 2 hits, and get 6 outs via BIP. He’ll have a K/9 of 6.75, and have pitched 2.2 innings.
See the problem there? From a Defense-Independent perspective, these two days were exactly the same. From FIP’s perspective:
A) (-2*2)/1.333 = -3.0 (or normalized 3.10 -3.0 = .1)
B) (-2*3)/2.666 = -1.5 (or normalized 3.10 – 1.5 = 1.6)
See the problem here? If you’re being truly defense independant, these pitchers were exactly the same. FIP doesn’t see it that way, it actually penalized the second pitcher for getting outs via BIP, IE, it can punish pitchers for getting groundballs, or being in front of good defenses.
It behaves a little differently when the term is positive, but BABIP is still a very important factor in it. In short, its a very flawed stat.
I would agree and suggest that theories about babip and HR/FB rely on the fact that the quality of competition and outcomes are normally distributed. Things that fall outside of this are subject to different statistics or at least different values within the systems.
I think a better explanation for this issue with DIPS is that “awful” pitchers are likely to have been unlucky.
I have read more than a few times from DIPS enthusiasts that the pitchers who manage to consistently yield high babips will probably wash out of the league because their stuff is just not “major league worthy. There is something of a selection bias at play in the league average of ~.300 babip for pitchers.
Not a very scientific analysis, but it sounds objectively reasonable. That Jose Lima, Carlos Silva, and Nate Robertson each had pretty fringy stuff at their peaks and washed out fairly quickly despite spurts of success passes both the eyeball and DIPS theory test for me.
Hello Matt Cain vs. Greinke comparison.
Grienke has a pretty mediocre fastball pitch rating (around – 3) this year. Both, Vazquez and Nolaso’s are pretty poor to. By comparison Matt Cain’s fastball is excellent. Considering that isn’t it plausible that poor or excellent fastball ratings can throw off a pitcher’s fip and x/fip?
Note: I’m not all that familiar with the inner workings of the stats, so if what I just said was incredibly dumb feel free to point that out.
It’s -3 because he’s unlucky, not because it’s bad.
Those pitch values are based on the results not the talent.
Pitch values are not fielding independent.
Thanks for the clarification
This is fun! Would be interesting to see the bottom of the list too (where E-X is large and negative).
I’m curious: has anyone actually graphed a pitcher’s ERA, FIP, and xFIP throughout a season to see if they converge?
What about highly negative ERA – xFIP? Which pitchers perform much worse in the ERA than we’d otherwise expect. I bet that list would be very interesting to see!
Just looked it up, and here is the list in the reverse direction:
Most negative ERA – xFIP
1) Al Leiter (2004) -2.06
2) Clay Buchholz (2010) -1.74
3) Daisuke Matsuzaka (2008) -1.74
4) Jair Jurrjens (2009) -1.68
5) Ryan Franklin (2003) -1.62
6) Jamie Moyer (2003) -1.55
7) Barry Zito (2003) -1.55
8) Jarrod Washburn (2005) -1.53
9) J.A. Happ (2009) -1.5
10) Roger Clemens (2005) -1.44
Josh Collmenter for this season would have been atop Johnathon’s list prior to his last start. Alexi Ogando’s ERA is finally rising now but he was up there for awhile too.
“because it is incredibly rare for anyone to finish with a huge disagreement between those two data points.”
It is?
Given how few guys had 1.5+ run differences in either direction, yeah. There were only 14 of the 870, or 1.6%. To me that’s rare. I guess I could’ve put the number in there, but this seems nitpicky, no?
I’d consider +/- 1 run to be a huge difference. Whats the standard deviation in ERA? 1/2 a run?
Why would you compare raw xFIP with actual ERA within the same season? xFIP assumes a league-average HR/flyball rate, which is not going to make much sense in many ballparks. E.g., the Padres have had a home xFIP of 3.98 vs an actual home ERA of 3.54 since 2001. This is certainly not luck (7,000+ IP); it’s a park effect.
On the other end, the Rockies have had a 4.32/4.92 xFIP/ERA difference at home since 2001. xFIP is fine for assessing the skills of a pitcher as they would play out in a MLB-average environment. It’s not appropriate for estimating a pitcher’s rest of season ERA (same team/park), as you have no way of knowing how much of the difference is due to park and defense.
E.g., if a Padres pitcher has an xFIP and ERA which are identical, that’s an unexpected result. It means he has been unlucky (or the team defense has been so atrocious as to overcome the HR/FB park effect).
I would somewhat Disagree. The park effect is surely there, but I think some pitchers pitch to their respective parks, like Matt Cain looks like he does. Its not that they are getting “lucky,” but that they purposefully pitch for more fly balls, because much less fly balls go out.
This is simply untrue. Cain does not induce more flyballs at home. His career flyball rates are 44.5% home and 45.3% road.
I somewhat Agree.
What about a guy like Carlos Villaneuva this year, ERA below 3 but his FIP and xFIP are abover 5
Am I looking at the wrong Carlos Villanueva? ERA/FIP/xFIP 3.24/3.49/4.12 (though I must admit, with 5.3% HR/FB, .239 BABIP and only 5.85 K/9 that xFIP does seem kinda low)
There is definitely more to pitching than Peripherals. While peripherals are a large component to pitching success, it would be staggeringly difficult to explain guys like Mo Rivera if all of pitching is peripherals, unless you just say he has been unbelievably lucky (.264 career BABIP with some pretty bad defenses behind him) for 17 years.
Just because those other issues haven’t been mathematically defined yet, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Like most 2nd order factors, they are probably much more important at the tail end of the distributions, some very good pitchers and the very bad pitchers.
@Djcahill. Agreed and Rivera is a great example of a pitcher who can be expected sustain a low BABIP. His cutter yields a lot of weak contact. Problem is how do you differentiate between a hard liner and a soft liner or a hard GB and a soft ground ball. For x-FIP to be a complete statistic it needs to accomplish this.
@Djcahill
100% agreement.
I watched many of J. Vazquez’s starts the “good” year he was with the Braves. Javy isn’t unlucky – he throws meatballs when runners are on base. Why does he abandon his plan? dunno. Maybe someone needs to help him work on his delivery out of the stretch. Point is – if you watch him pitch enough you’ll see him get to around the 4th or 5th inning and just start letting guys score.
Well Greinke had another shit start.
I have a question. Instead of saying “his peripherals look great, eventually his ERA will lower” could we be saying “his peripherals look great, but he’s getting rocked, so maybe eventually his FIP will be higher”?
Or is this FIP, which doesn’t consider outcomes not walks, ks, or hrs (which I’m just going to guess is a HUGE percent of outcomes) just so awesome that we can’t fathom IT being the thing that’s wrong.
It’d be fun to see what you guys would have said about Tom Glavine. He pretty consistently (like in 13 seasons) pitched below his FIP. Especially in his prime. I guess like any other pitchers who is successful that doesn’t K a lot of guys, Glavine was just lucky for 20 years.
You cannot cherry pick the stats you want to believe to make your argument, well you can I guess, and you are, but it doesn’t make it anymore true.
I’m going to concentrate solely on Greinke.
FIP and xFIP, BABIP, LD%, ect. are indicators used to try and predict the future outcome based on results thus far, and comparing them to a players history, which is obviously the best indicator of what a player in capable of, right?
So if Greinke’s lifetime BABIP is .309. Your saying that it’s more likely that it stays at it’s current .341 than dropping at all.
Your also saying his LOB% is going to be almost 17% lower than his career rate, and 17% below the league average.
Your saying he will continue to give up double his career HR/FB rate, also 6% above the league.
Can you defend your stance?
You certainly cannot say it’s from a drop out in his strikeout ability. He is K’ing people at a career best 11.72 K/9, which is crazy.
You can’t say it’s because he is walking too many people.
He is walking people at a 1.84 BB/9, also a career best.
You could say that his LD% is high, and you’d finally be right, it is 3% higher than his career norm.
Would you be willing to bet that your entire argument rests on Greinke continuing to be “shitty” on account of that?
I doubt it.
I realize you are probably just a disgruntled Greinke owner, I get that, and you have every right to be, but the very big reality is that he has been unlucky, and things should start to change.
I will give one extra piece of advice for anyone willing to listen. If this doesn’t correct itself this year (Two things, 1. I am fully invested in Greinke and think this ship rights itself, and 2. It could be a Josh Beckett/Jame Shields type year, but more on that…)
I truly believe that Greinke will be the best draft target of 2012, I would be willing to bet he goes 6 or 7th round or later, and I believe he is Cy worthy nest year.
/rant
I don’t own Greinke. I just think that after half a season and a guy having a high ERA, THAT high, you can’t say it’s all bad luck. Maybe if his ERA was like 4 and his FIP 2.50, but his ERA is 5.66.
What you are doing would not work in the real world. Real performance>what he should have done.
Imagine you work for an advertising firm. You do research, you conclude that a certain type of advertisement should increase sales 20%. You run it, it doesn’t, it actually drops. You run more studies, interview people, etc. Still you conclude that it should have increased sales 20%, it doesn’t, still sales drop. Your client is PISSED at this point. You say “well you really shouldn’t be mad, statistically speaking this should have been better”.
It wasn’t better, Greinke hasn’t pitched better. He’s been very bad in 12 stars. He SHOULD pitch better the rest of the way, if for nothing else, because a guy as good as Greinke should pitch better than 5.66. However, to say that a 5.66 ERA over nearly 70 innings is “bad luck” is absurd. He hasn’t pitched well.
I realize FIP is more of a predictor. His ERA will drop. I just feel like people put too much weight on FIP. It discounts too much of the game.
If Pitcher A walks 2, Ks 2, and gets a ton of weak ground outs and gives up a home run for his only ER, his FIP is higher than Pitcher B if he walks 1, Ks 5, and gives up 6 doubles for 3 ER. If they pitched the same amount of innings, FIP says that Pitcher B is “unlucky”. It discredits too much of the game. Pitching to contact is a HUGE part of being a successful pitcher. Ks, low BBs, not giving up the long ball, etc are all great. So it getting 3 outs on 5 pitchings.
Posting from mu phone so here it goes.
You keep saying that Fip has shortcomings.
I think everyone else knows this.
Your putting too much emphasis on Era in the exact same way. Other than ERA Greinke is a Cy candidate.
In a standard roto league Greinke is gold.
As for your business sales comparison, if I made a market projection for a way to increase profits by 20% I certainly hope I’m making this projection based on something. Maybe other sales trends in the field, maybe new markets, something.
What your saying is that Fip has too many flaws(agreed) so Grienke is not a good pitcher because his Era( TERRIBLE judge of a pitcher) is high.
I’m saying Greinke has been on the wrong side of luck, not based on Fip alone but on every statistic we use to determine why a pitcher is faring the way he has.
Final question if you and I throw out his Fip and xfip and era, tell me how’s he doing this year?
Greinke hasn’t done his job of keeping runs off the board. ERA maybe be partially based on defense, stadium, etc, but a 5.66 is bad enough that I think you can use it. When judging his past performance, as in, what has actually happened. He hasn’t pitched well. ERA isn’t “TERRIBLE” it’s just not perfect.
Just like with Jurrjens I’d like to see someone look at every single one of Greinke’s starts and look at every ball hit.
So you are unable to take 30 seconds and give me a breakdown of Greinke’s season without using ERA?
I kinda didn’t think you would.
Either way ERA is inferior to the FIP’s.
Another “bad start” for Greinke today. He has so far given up 4 ER all on ground balls (and one Joey Votto HR). 2 runs are scored on a groundball that gets booted by Matt Gamel, a guy who’s poor defensively at 3rd base in the minors.
Oh yeah and 7 k’s, 1 BB, 1 HBP.
The guy is getting terribly unlucky at times and this game is a perfect example.
Thank you Kris for watching the game and having something to stand on. The pitch to Votto was his only real mistake.
I’ll cite luck one last time, but only so many seeing eye singles can find there way through, unless of course Matt Gamel in part of that infield.
That was an error for every other 3b in professional baseball.
And they just changed it to an error.
6ip, 6 h, 2BB, 2er, and 10k’s
Also he left the game with the lead, so no one can complain about the win here.
He is gonna be huge in the 2nd half.
Calling all hater, calling all haters, where’d they go?