Monday, June 7, 2010

Mass Destruction

Another Mass-ively disappointing output by A. J. Mass, one of ESPN's fantasy baseball columnists. I give Mass a little credit for taking an analytical approach to his work, but only a little, because as an analyst, he just is not very good. His most recent article "The True Value of FIP" evidences this.

The True Value of FIP

Lost in all the hoopla of Jim Joyce's call at first base during Armando Galarraga's attempt at perfection was the fact the Detroit Tigers pitcher was lucky to still have been in a position to make history. If not for Austin Jackson making a spectacular grab on Mark Grudzielanek's fly ball, the Indians would have had their first hit a couple of batters sooner, and with zero controversy.

A quick aside (this paragraph has little to do with the article, so it's a good spot for an aside): I, like everybody else, watched the non-perfect-perfect-game-play, ad nauseam. So far, I am the only person I know (except for my friend's wife) who thinks it was not such a bad call. It is really hard to tell, even in super slow motion, when the pitcher has control of the ball. The runner was probably out, and given the circumstances it is pretty weak that the ump did not give the pitcher the benefit of the call, but I do not think it is the huge travesty that everybody else seems to think it is. OK, back to the article.

Pitchers, in fact, have very little control over what happens once balls get put into play. Bad hops, bounced throws, balls that fall into the stands just out of the reach of an outstretched glove -- there's nothing a pitcher can do about any of those things, except shrug his shoulders and forge on. Through the sabermetric work of Voros McCracken, Tom Tango and others, it became very clear that in order to truly measure the impact on the result of a game made by an individual pitcher, you had to take defense out of the equation. And thus, a new stat, Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) was born.

Nice. I am a fan of FIP (though I prefer xFIP), so I like this so far.

What is FIP? It's a measure of how successfully a pitcher takes matters into his own hands, for better or for worse. Combining home runs allowed, walks and strikeouts -- none of which the defense can do anything about -- FIP creates a single number that attempts to be a better predictor of a pitcher's future ERA than his ERA itself.

It is after this paragraph that an astute reader can tell that the rest of the article is likely to be bad, as Mass already shows a lack of understanding of FIP. FIP is not a measure of "how successfully a pitcher takes matters into his own hands, for better or for worse." FIP, like ERA, is a measure of how effective a pitcher is. A low FIP means good pitching, a high one means bad pitching. Unlike ERA, it is calculated using only stats that the pitcher has almost sole control of. We can think of FIP as measuring a pitcher's performance "in a vacuum" and of ERA as measuring a pitcher's performance "on the diamond". That's a much better description of FIP than what Mass gives, because it is actually accurate.


A Basic FIP Formula: FIP = [(13*HR) + (3*BB) - (2*K)]/IP + 3.10

Proponents of FIP would have us believe that if a pitcher's ERA is far lower than his FIP, we should expect a regression the following season. Similarly, if a pitcher has a higher ERA than FIP, then he was probably more unlucky than anything else, and due for a bounce-back campaign. So how does that play so far in 2010? Let's go to the leaderboard and see:

2010 ERA Leaders
Through June 4