Historic FIP
May 23, 2006
Cyril Morong has created a historical look at the greatest FIP years for individual pitchers. FIP, which stands for Fielding-Independent Pitching, is a relatively simple yet powerful pitching stat. It weights strikeouts, walks and home runs—those things that a pitcher is solely responsible for—to produce a fair ERA without all the surrouding “noise” of bloop hits and bad fielders.
Cyril did some more things to standardize FIP even further. His weights are slightly different than ones I’ve used in the past, he didn’t create specific ERA constants for each year and he “normalized” the range of strikeouts, walks and home runs in each year. I guess these are “ultra-normalized” FIP’s but I wonder if sometimes stats become so sanitized that they lose value instead of adding insight.
It would be good to see some more discussion of why he added his extra calculations and what the impact of them was.
Those calculations were necessary to standardize everything and make different seasons comparable. There are two ways to do this: the James way, and the Schell way. James did this in WS by working from a top-down system (and I do the same in my Pitching W/L system), which compares a player to his peers by necessity, because there are only a certain amount of wins to be divided for that year. Schell does what Cyril is doing—normalizing everything by seeing how many SDs away from the mean for that year a player is. Both are valid, and both should produce similar results.
As for the values Cyril used, they are slightly more accurate than the 13/3/2 weighting people usually use for FIP. If you multiply them by 9 (for IP/Game), you get 12.96/2.97/1.98, which Tango simply rounded to 13/3/2.
Posted by David Gassko on 05/24 at 04:19 AM
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