What the F.I.P.?

     For those that have been reading for some time, you’ll know that I’ve never been one to get crazy with the hardcore mathematics with respect to fantasy baseball.  I know that baseball is a game of averages and other numbers and I do some routine number crunching of my own , as well as look for statistical trends and what not, but I tend to shy away from a lot of the latest sabermetric primers that so many people seem to hold as gospel.  Now don’t get me wrong, I think there’s plenty of validity to most of these crazy acronyms that we’ve seen over the last few years, but I also see a lot of flaws in living and dying by these numbers.  I’m a firm believer in a lot of intangibles that the pragmatists dismiss as mere conjecture and I look at the players’ personalities and situations just as much as I examine three year averages.  You’d be surprised to see how many deviations there are from the expected numerical outcomes due to circumstances that statisticians tend not to follow.  But lately there’s one statistic that I’ve been studying a little more intently as I’ve been scouring through my pitching depth charts, and while I’m sure it, too, has its flaws, I’ve found it to be a great tool for finding some key late round steals for your fantasy rotation.  It’s called F.I.P. (Fielding Independent Pitching) and it’s going to help you find some nice fantasy baseball sleepers and build a solid pitching staff for cheap while you spend the majority of your picks/fantasy auction dollars on an offense worthy of your opponents’ envy.

     For those that aren’t aware of what FIP is, let me try to explain as easy as possible.  It all started with the metric BABIP which stands for Batting Average on Balls In Play and is exactly what it sounds like — the rate of balls that could be theoretically caught by a defender that instead land for hits.  It leaves out home runs (as they are uncatchable) and centers around how many balls are finding holes when the opposing hitter make contact.  An average BABIP for a pitcher would be .300 while anything lower is to the pitcher’s advantage and anything higher means that the pitcher is giving up a lot of hits but not necessarily because of his pitching.  I believe the metric was actually started as a way to see which hitters with mediocre batting averages were just victims of good defense and could be counted on to improve their totals as the law of averages balanced everything out, but was soon adopted for pitchers to determine the same thing — which pitchers, with either really good or really bad ERAs were going to soon level off.  It’s been a great tool for your buying low/selling high during the season as it helps you see which inflated ERAs will come down as the season progresses and vice-versa.

     Due to the fact that BABIP was originally designed to analyze hitters, analysts, most notably Tom Tango, wanted to create a formula that offered the same type of BABIP-free number but made to look more like a pitcher’s ERA.  That way, you get a better sense as to just how well these pitchers were pitching by subtracting the performance of their defenders as well as any other random occurrances.  And so brought on the creation of FIP — a metric derived to calculate a pitchers ERA sans the influence of defense and other random acts of the baseball gods.

     Now it’s time to implement the usage towards your upcoming fantasy draft or, if you’ve already done so, then enable you to compile a list of players who should see a substantial improvement in their actual ERA as the season progresses.  Your first step is to take a look at players whose FIP is lower than their actual ERA.  That would be the clearest indication of a pitcher who pitches well, but sufffers from unlucky occurrances brought on by fielding mistakes.  Conventional wisdom says that these pitchers can’t be unlucky all of the time, and therefore should improve as things tend to balance out.  Using 2009 statistics, let’s take a look at some of the player’s I’m talking about.

     Now just to make sure we’re playing along at home properly, let me ask you this question:  Based on what we’ve learned today with FIP, which player on the above lists would it make the most sense to go after in your draft?  If you said Ricky Nolasco, then you’re exactly where you need to be.  If you said Justin Verlander, then you’re a small step ahead of my next point.  If you said J.A. Happ, then you’re way off and still don’t understand the concept.  If that’s the case, then please go back and re-read the article or let me join a league with you that has crazy money at stake.  Seriously though, in looking at the above totals and with what we’ve learned about FIP, then Nolasco is the guy to shoot for in your draft.  His dismal 5.04 ERA shows some serious struggles in 2009, but his 3.35 FIP indicates that it’s not all his fault.

     If you owned Nolasco last year, then you already know what I’m talking about when I say that he was one of the best buy low candidates out there last year if you were looking at FIP rather than just the basic ERA and WHIP totals you see.  His April and May were downright atrocious as he allowed 66 hits in 46 2/3 innings and saw his ERA at a staggering 8.49.  For the sabermetric hounds, his BABIP was sitting at .390, far beyond what was the league average.  But, if you looked at both his walk rate and K-rate, you would have seen that they were both still in line with his breakout 2008 totals.  Solid strikeouts, a limited number of walks and an astronomical BABIP that couldn’t possibly remain that high all season.  With indicators like that, it was only natural that you check his FIP and see just how far below it sat beneath his regular ERA.

    Fast forward to Nolasco’s insane June totals, solid July numbers and reasonably average August and September stats, and you’ll see that the indicators were right.  Nolasco wasn’t getting burned by bad hops, poor jumps on a fly ball or any of the other silliness he suffered from in the beginning of the season; not entirely.  I can’t say that everything that went wrong for him in the beginning of the year  was the fault of his defense, but it was obviously a major contributor.  But the fact, that he went from a BAA (batting average against) of around .350 in those first two months to never allowing a BAA higher than .243 for any of the remining months, shows me that the blame doesn’t always sit with the man on the mound.

     Now obviously, this is not an exact science.  The subjectiveness that comes from determining what balls can and cannot be caught becomes a serious wild card factor in the equation.  Who determines what fly ball is capable of being caught and what one isn’t?  How do we know the outfielder got a bad jump or if the wind was carrying the ball?  There’s no real formula for that and therefore reveals certain flaws in the determining factors for BABIP and FIP.  But to use them in terms of fantasy baseball can be very helpful as a guideline — not a precise calculation, but a rough estimate that might not be so rough after all.  Clear as mud?  I’m sure.

     In any event, as confusing as some of the logistics are behind all of this, it is still a great tool for determining some of the lower round picks you should be making.  Nolasco’s 5.04 ERA will undoubtedly keep him off of a lot of folks’ radar, but by looking a little deeper into the numbers, you now have the advantage over your fellow owners and wait on him as a later round steal.  Obviously, guys like Verlander and Cole Hamels will go early in your draft and rightfully so, but veterans like Paul Maholm and Derek Lowe, coming off of mediocre to poor seasons should be found in the bargain bin. 

     And just as a disclaimer here, I am certainly not saying that any player with an FIP lower than his actual ERA is someone to target.  You have to check and see what their current situation is on their team.  Did the team make defensive upgrades heading into 2010?  Did the team lose their shorstop and are now filling in the gap with makeshift pieces?  What’s the pitcher’s injury history?  Personally, I have a hard time endorsing guys like Livan Hernandez and Carl Pavano regardless of what their numbers looked like last year.  You have to be smart about how you use the information you’re given.  Don’t just look at the numbers and target these guys.  Use it as a guideline to help better evaluate your desired selections.  Yes, if I’m at the end of my draft and I have the option of drafting Pavano or John Lannan, I’m going with Pavano every time.  But if it’s Pavano and Trevor Cahill (-0.70), then I’m likely to go for the youngster with the better upside regardless of their FIP differences.

     For a complete list of 2009 FIP and BABIP totals for both pitchers and hitters, check out FanGraphs.com.  For the sake of this article, I’ll guide you to where you need to be — for pitchers BABIP, check out the “Batted Ball” part of the statistics and for FIP, check out the “Advanced” page.

     Good luck and I’ll see you all in the money this year!

Tagged as: BABIP, Bronson Arroyo, Carl Pavano, Cole Hamels, Derek Lowe, ERA, fantasy baseball, fantasy baseball auction, fantasy baseball draft, Fantasy Baseball Sleepers, FIP, JA Happ, Jair Jurrjens, Jason Hammel, John Danks, John Lannan, Jorge De La Rosa, justin verlander, Kevin Millwood, Livan Hernandez, Matt Cain, Mike Pelfrey, Paul Maholm, pitchers, Randy Wells, Rick Porcello, Ricky Nolasco, Ross Ohlendorf, sleepers, Trevor Cahill