My eyes are telling me one thing....but the stats are telling me they are actually much much worse than I am seeing. He's riding a slippery slope right now, but he's certainly doing a good job of eating innings and keeping the team in ballgames, which is more than 95% of back of the rotation starters in the game.
Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand
You've made this argument before, and I still disagree with it.Originally Posted by RedsManRick
Let me get a few points across about my argument first, because I am not making the same one that many who have a problem with FIP make.
I like FIP more than ERA, by a lot, but I still think it needs improvement.
It makes sense to isolate K/BB and HR's, because those are things that a pitcher has the most control over.
However, I do not agree at all with your assertion that a pitcher's ability to suppress hits and XBH are included in his K/BB and HR/9 rates. Maybe to some extent, but definitely not enough to exclude hits and XBH from a stat that measures a pitcher's effectiveness.
This is the statement that I disagree with the most:
If you can prevent guys from squaring up the ball and hitting doubles, you are also preventing HRs and getting a fair amount of Ks when guys swing and miss. It all comes from the same underlying ability of the pitcher to fool the hitter.
When a hitter hits a homerun, he usually is using a different swing than when he gets any other type of hit. Nearly all homers are hit off of meatballs, really big mistake pitches. Every hitter has a batting practice swing, one in which they just let it rip. A meatball is a pitch that lets the hitter use his batting practice swing. They give the hitter time to rear back and give it his best batting practice swing. This is how even guys like Taveras and Castro can hit homers. These pitches are belt high or higher and in the middle of plate, and most importantly, they have either very little movement, or very predictable movement, i.e hanging breaking pitches.
On all other hits, the batter is just trying to hit it hard. The pitch is not in his wheelhouse, or is moving, or coming in a different speed, so the batter can’t just let it rip, he has to adjust his swing and just try to hit it as hard as he can. These are most of the swings that a batter makes.
This is why a pitcher has more control over how many homers he gives up than how many hits. The less meatballs you throw, the less homers you will give up. Period.
But a pitcher can not throw any meatballs, and still get hit hard. And the reverse, he can throw a lot of meatballs, but look unhittable the rest of the time. It simply is not true that if a pitcher can prevent a hitter from hitting doubles and singles, he is also preventing home runs. The two are not related most of the time.
As for K’s and making guys swing and miss, it also is not the case that making guys swing and miss and preventing hits are related.
Most pitchers don’t get outs by not allowing the hitter to square up on the ball, that is not the key to most guy’s success. The key is to strike out a lot of guys, and therefore put less balls into play, and therefore give up less hits. I think we agree that most pitchers can’t control their BABIP, so by simple math, a pitcher can succeed best by limiting the number of balls put into play, he doesn’t need to prevent them from squaring up on the ball. That will happen enough times naturally, and when the hitters does square up, the defense will be there to prevent hits enough times.
So if a guy K’s a lot of hitters, he will give up less hits due to simple math. But the opposite is not true. Just because a pitcher does not make a hitter swing and miss, it does not mean that the pitcher can’t surpress hits.
As I have said, pitchers with lots of movement on their pitches, can get hitters to “just miss” on pitches, and ground out or fly out, instead of hitting line drives. This is why knuckleball pitchers have much lower BABIP than other pitchers. Guys just don’t get good swings off of them. This is true for guys like Maddux, Leake, Arroyo, Danny Graves, Paul Byrd, Trevor Hoffman, and others with great off-speed pitches. They have have lower BABIP than most pitchers because hitters can’t square up on the ball. This is due to the same theory that explains knuckleball pitchers. They need this, since they are not striking out as many hitters, so their key is to prevent the hitter not from making contact, but from making solid contact.
I think that it is this group of pitchers that FIP misses, and why it needs to include hits and XBH somehow in it’s equation. Otherwise, guys who don’t miss a lot of bats, but instead get a lot of “miss hits”, will be unfairly penalized with FIP.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
Tool.
For most of the years his peripherals were in line with his career.
Recently, while his results have been better, his peripherals have been quite poor.
To me that is the concern.
I don't think that is close to the truth. You need to credit the batter here too. The best HR hitters frequently hit HR's on pitches that are far from meatballs.
If this was true, wouldn't thoise pitchers have lower BABIP's than other pitchers like you say?
In fact, they don't.
Graves .291
Maddux .289
Arroyo .294
Leake .300
Byrd .294
are all well within the normal range of BABIP distribution.
Even guys like Wainwright with one of the majors best curveballs and a (generally) great defense behind him is at .298.
I'll stand by me belief that to the extent that pitchers can control BABIP, it is marginal at best.
How many great home run hitters are there that can do this? Seriously? Maybe a dozen in the majors, and they probably do that on around 10% of their home runs. Well over 90% of all homers were hit off of bad pitches.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
But they are all on the low side of the range. And those were just a few guys off the top of my head. If you look at the stat more closely, you will find the pitchers with little movement normally are in the .310-.315 range and the guys with lots of movement are in the .295-.300 range.
(You conveniently left out Hoffman, who is at .266, but let's just call him ann outlier).
And one thing that BABIP leaves out is SLG. There is no data on it, but intuitively, it makes sense that guys with little movement, but who throw hard, will be giving up more doubles and triples among their hits than guys like Bronson and Leake.
The key issue here is that guys with a lot of movement consistently have ERA's that are around a half a run lower than their FIP. I'm looking for a way to correct that. And I agree that pitchers that don't have a lot of movement on their pitches usually don't have much control over their BABIP, but there are enough that have movement that do, that it should be addressed.
Last edited by TheNext44; 06-27-2010 at 09:03 AM.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
Next 44, where did you get 90% figure from. I think it's a very interesting premise, that homers come against a significantly different set of pitches than do other extra base hits, but I'm not sure where to find that data.
Similarly on the babip by movement grouping.of pitchers. It's an interesting observation and I'd love to see the data.
My basic premise is not that FIP is the best measure of pitcher skill, just better than ERA. What it loses in not having batted ball data it makes up for in being defense neutral and removing the "random" grouping of events which leads to runs in individual circumstances but which is not necessarily indicative of a skill. BP has a stat called SIERRA which uses batted ball data too and would be better to use than FIP if it were free.
In any event, I'd like to learn more about the systemic biases in FIP.
Games are won on run differential -- scoring more than your opponent. Runs are runs, scored or prevented they all count the same. Worry about scoring more and allowing fewer, not which positions contribute to which side of the equation or how "consistent" you are at your current level of performance.
You are talking about a 3% difference which could be easily due to randomness or defense, ballpark etc.
And do you have data to back it up.
Josh Fogg is at .299 too.
For at least his last couple games his fastballs are mostly 89-90....topping out at 91. Early in the year (and previous years) ......it was 92-93 and topping out at 94.
He's just able to get that past hitters like previously. I don't know if it's a dead arm period, naggin injury, fatigue......but he's got to get that velocity back to keep hitters off guard as he has in past years.
Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand
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