Using FIP to evaluate pitchers? I wouldn’t

Good stuff, Derek. I like the philosophy behind LIPS ERA and Baseball HQ’s xERA best.

When evaluating a pitcher’s ‘true’ talent level this may be useful to know.  But in a given season, which is the range we’re talking about for most fantasy purposes, the HR/FB ratio is going to be influenced by the park the pitcher is playing in,  opposing hitters etc.  It doesn’t make much sense to dismiss it as a vagary of sample size when we know that pitchers in Philadelphia and Colorado are going to tend to yield a higher ratio than those in Petco and Safeco.

Well, color me confused.  It’s difficult to understand what LIPS is because you haven’t given a definition of it.  The other confusing thing is that when I look at the ERA, the LIPS and the FIP, assuming all three are supposed to represent runs/game - LIPS is the least accurate predictor.  Unless your fantasy league uses LIPS… what is the point of the article again?

How do you explain a guy like ubaldo jimenez, who consistently has a low hr/fb?
Also, Lips era has joe blanton having a lower era than chad billingsley?? I know it is just one example, but it raises my suspicions on the method

Just by looking at your table, it seems that FIP is closer to ERA than LIPS. I am also not sold on the idea that pitcher’s stuff or whatever he has does not have any relationship to HR/FB. HR/FB of pitchers are rather steady throughout one’s career. Could it be that if those flyballs are hit better and end up flying longer than they should be? Some had research on sinker and find out that a faster sinker is better than a diving sinker in generating GB. Could it be that pitcher with high velocity and simultaneously generates a lot of GB have lower HR/FB rate? Lowe generates a lot of GB but give up a more HR per FB, while Jimenez give up fewer per FBs.

Kampfer,

John’s explanation is exactly right. We don’t care about looking backwards, since we already know what a pitcher’s ERA was. What we’re interested in is what his ERA will be. If you compare how good FIP and LIPS are at predicting that, you’ll see that LIPS takes the cake and is therefore more useful.

As for pitchers controlling their HR/F, I’ve done a lot of work on this, the definitive piece being in the Hardball Times Annual 2007. Pick it up if you’d like to see all the gory details, but the basic conclusion is that pitchers have a tiny bit of control over HR/F, but not much. After many years, a pitcher’s personal HR/F is meaningful, but in one season (or in this case, after two-and-a-half months) it is mostly noise.

xFIP is close to LIPS, but it does not take into account as much as LIPS - things like park effects, batted ball types beyond OF flies, etc. xFIP is good, but LIPS is better.

Has anyone done a rigorous test of xFIP/LIPS/xERA/QERA/tRA and whether it actually reflects true talent better than FIP? I’m not doubting that someone has, I just don’t know where to find it.

And Fangraphs now publishes projections updated in-season - shouldn’t that be a better estimate of true talent than any of those?

It’s a question of what question you’re asking. There are two questions, “What should the pitcher’s ERA be, given his exhibited skills?” and “What should the pitcher’s ERA be, given his predicted skills?”, and both are legitimate. That’s why Heater includes both LIPS ERA and True Talent ERA.

Mike Ketchen,
As David and John have already pointed out, LIPS does indeed have better than value than FIP year-to-year. 

The Real Neal,
I think you might be overestimating the impact of park factors.  It’s much sounder to assume that the player will post a normal HR/FB (we’ll say 10%) and then park adjust from there.  For the most extreme HR park in baseball (U.S. Cellular Field - PF = 1.26), we’d expect a pitcher to post a 12.6% HR/FB while pitching at home.  If we assume a league average mix of road parks though (and an even playing time split), his overall HR/FB would only be 11.3%.  That’s not nearly as bad as most guys on this list (some of whom are in the high teens and even twenties), implying that those rates should and will eventually come down.

It’s actually sounder still to rig up a full projected HR/FB, which would include past numbers, park adjustments, age adjustments, and a heavy regression to the mean component (in addition to some other, mostly optional, things), but the simple exercise above will suffice for most all SPs for practical purposes.

Also, in regard to LIPS, it’s something I’ve written about quite a bit, but I think a primer would be very useful to have for newer readers or those still unfamiliar with LIPS.  As David and John have said, it does some very nice things.