Quote:
Originally Posted by dougdirt
And we know that even with "normal pitchers" it is predictive, but not definitive. With so few knuckleballers, the error bars are even higher. Toss in that I don't know that we have ever had a knuckleballer who throws as hard as Dickey does and we are working on an entirely different level. So no, we don't really know if he is outperforming his "FIP" or not. You are making some awful large assumptions on an already presumptuous theory.
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FIP is a calculation. Considering it is an *estimate* of what one's ERA would be expected to be based on peripherals, it is absolutely 100% accurate to say he outperformed his FIP... because he did. He outperformed his estimators. That's not even remotely debatable. And again, it is an "estimate" and nowhere did I say it was definitive; it's simply an estimator. But research shows that FIP does have a high correlation for knuckleballers, so therefore, one should not necessarily expect him to continually outperform his FIP.
There's nothing to debate here. It's an estimate that has a high correlation. It's not an exact science nor was it being positioned as such. He outperformed his estimator. Doesn't mean he can't or won't continue to do so, but he did the past three years.