Saturday, August 01, 2015
Bill James on FIP
What we're always trying to do is see through the illusions created by the numbers and see what is underneath and real and the fielding independent pitching numbers are quite helpful in that respect because it's a systemized, organized effort to filter out the things that are in the pitcher's record which aren't real. They're not related to his skill, it's just something that happened. That's tremendously helpful and tremendously significant.
If you go back to the oldest way of looking at a pitcher — 1975 — pitchers were evaluated by win-loss records. You'd have a pitcher sometimes who might have an ERA of 4.80, but they scored a ton of runs for him and he finished 17-9. People actually thought that he was a great pitcher because he had this ability to pitch well enough and win.
In the modern world, we know that it's nonsense and they just scored a lot of runs for him. Even the dumbest guy in baseball knows that win-loss records aren't that reliable because the offense doesn't even out for people. That's a circumstance-dependent record. ERA is a circumstance-dependent record. But even if you filter out the illusions in ERA and the illusions in run support, some guys are just lucky. Fielding independent pitching stats are an effort to filter that out and to the extent that they're successful, it's tremendously useful to do that.
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