It is weird that “averaging rWAR and fWAR” was never an option.

DC states that both WAR version have their flaws, but averaging them would seem to “reduce” the magnitude of each’s flaws … rather than choosing just one and hoping that it’s the one that most accurately represents the value of the pitcher.

I’m repeating myself again. Crap.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/why-our-pitcher-war-uses-fip/
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/why-our-pitcher-war-uses-fip-part-two/

Sidebar: does FIP or xFIP incorporate a pitcher’s ability to negate the running game (e.g. Carpenter great, Lincecum crappy) or field their position?

When a pitcher throws a sphere 93mph and the batter strikes it with a cylinder with enough force to send it at 100mph … where it drops or goes is a mere matter of millimeters on the bat.

My issue with the word “luck” is that it implies it is not the result of skill.

In the baseball version of luck it is more in line with “random” in the regard that anything in the realm of probability can happen. But, I also point out that everything in life “luck” in that regard.

It’s all probabilities.

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As for Zavada, he complained his arm hurt in September. He was told it’s all in his head. He kept pitching. He now has a 6-inch scar on his elbow as a result of him imagining his arm hurt. He’ll be back. He’s not the most talented guy on the block, but he can’t be rattled. Baseball can’t throw anything at him that life already hasn’t.

There aren’t a whole lot of other teams that use their bullpen to the degree Arizona has (nor have traded away so many relievers).

I’m not the biggest Arizona fan right now.

Luck is simply an intangible which can’t be quantified by stats.

There are too many variables involved to even try.

Think about it.

If “luck” played any small part in success, Clay Zavada and his baby mustache would still be pitching in Phoenix.

It wasn’t a matter of luck.

His body couldn’t handle the rigors of MLB pitching, thus he got injured.

http://207.56.97.150/articles/ipavg2.htm

What I have been doing is starting with this article ( http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/confessions-of-a-dips-apostate/ ), reading all of the information linked at the end of the article.

So far it’s about 130 pages (C&P’d into Word for saving).

What I cannot locate is Tom Tippet’s study on …

Tom Tippett of Diamond Mind Baseball published a lengthy study on pitchers with long careers and found evidence that those pitchers exhibited some ability to affect the rate of hits on balls in play

and

Tom Tippet showed that good pitchers allow less hits on balls in play than their teammates

For fun, I exported the career stats from this site into excel, specifically looking at K/9 and BB/9 and their correlation with BABIP … thinking that either high K guys’ stuff would be so good that they’d be hard to hit and/or guys with outstanding control might be hard to hit.

The graphs of each relationship is pretty much symmetrical when divided by a line at .290 BABIP. Then while reading I found that this had already been done by guys quite a bit smarter than me.