FIP
Description:
Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) measures what a player’s ERA should have looked like over a give time period, assuming that performance on balls in play and timing were league average. Back in the early 2000s, research by Voros McCracken revealed that the amount of balls that fall in for hits against pitchers do not correlate well across seasons. In other words, pitchers have little control over balls in play, so a better way to assess a pitcher’s talent level is by looking at things a pitcher can control: strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches, and homeruns.
Obviously, a walk is not as hurtful as a homerun and a strikeout has less impact than both. FIP accounts for these differences, and presents results on the same scale as ERA. It has been proven to be much more effective than ERA at predicting future performance, and has become a mainstay in sabermetric analysis.
Context:
2010 FIP Values
Things to Remember:
- Voros McCracken’s research was called Defense Independent Pitching Theory (DIPs Theory), and is the building block of most of today’s pitching analysis. It can be a tricky concept to understand and counterintuitive for most baseball fans, though, so please refer to our sections on DIPs, BABIP, and Luck for more information.
- FIP does a better job of predicting the future than of measuring the present, meaning there can be a lot of fluctuation in smaller samples. It’s not a great choice when trying to describe how a pitcher performed during a single game.
- In case you’re curious, here’s the formula for FIP: ((13*HR)+(3*(BB+HBP-IBB))-(2*K))/IP + constant
The constant is solely to bring FIP onto an ERA scale, and is generally around 3.20 (but it can be derived by finding the league-average FIP and subtracting that result from league-average ERA).
Links for Further Reading:
Intro to FIP – Big League Stew
1
I think that people should also read Tom Tippett’s excellent study on DIPS to see when DIPS does not worth for certain classes of pitchers: http://207.56.97.150/articles/ipavg2.htm
I could not find the original at Diamond Mind, but found this link via Google. They just had it on their website late last year but must have just dumped all the great articles he wrote while there. Too bad.
has anyone done a break-even analysis of walks versus home runs allowed, assuming that there is a direct trade-off? could be interesting.
How now, brown cow?
Home runs are random events.
Is a 180 foot fly ball a random event? Clearly, it is random: it may be caught or it may not. But how about a fly ball hit 380 feet? The non-random advocates would be forced to ask in what direction and in what park the fly ball was hit. In other words they can only certify its randomness by waiting until it lands. The same could be done for the 180 foot fly.
Baseball has non-uniform playing areas.