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OT: The Toronto Blue Jays

MindzEye said:
But who had the better year? The guy who K'd more often, BB'd less often but got mediocre or worse defence behind him on batted balls, or the guy who did the opposite?

Isolating pitching performance from defence is important, even without taking it's improved predictive value into account. This is the same idea as the old GAA vs SV% argument from in hockey.
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Yeah the idea that fip is just "should have" while runs are "what happened" is just a misunderstanding.

Fip also looks at what happened - it just looks only a the things which are mostly under a pitcher's control.
 
MindzEye said:
But who had the better year? The guy who K'd more often, BB'd less often but got mediocre or worse defence behind him on batted balls, or the guy who did the opposite?

Isolating pitching performance from defence is important, even without taking it's improved predictive value into account. This is the same idea as the old GAA vs SV% argument from in hockey.
Click to expand...
Who had a better year, the guy with more goals, or the guy with the higher xGF? And maybe separately, who should get the Rocket Richard trophy?

FIP is a partial approximation of performance isolated from defence. It's very imperfect. It doesn't consider quality of contact, for example. Some guys outperform their FIP because they are particularly lucky, some guys outperform it because they are particularly good.
 
zeke said:
Yeah the idea that fip is just "should have" while runs are "what happened" is just a misunderstanding.

Fip also looks at what happened - it just looks only a the things which are mostly under a pitcher's control.
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FIP is a measure of "what happened" treating all balls in play as exactly the same.
 
manny said:
Who had a better year, the guy with more goals, or the guy with the higher xGF?
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Bad analogy.

Better analogy: Who had the better year, the 49 goal scorer playing with bad teammates and highed xG or the 51 goal scorer playing with good teammates and lower xG?

manny said:
who should get the Rocket Richard trophy?
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Well, the guy who scored more goals obviously, it's a counting stat award. Who should get more MVP votes though?

manny said:
FIP is a partial approximation of performance isolated from defence. It's very imperfect. It doesn't consider quality of contact, for example. Some guys outperform their FIP because they are particularly lucky, some guys outperform it because they are particularly good.
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Sure, FIP is definitely flawed. But I'll take a reasonable attempt at explaining something obviously important over "fuck it, defence doesn't exist".

I mean, we have batted ball data in 2021 if we really want to add additional context to FIP.
 
zeke said:
True.

While ERA pretends defense is meaningless.
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IMO, ERA should be looked at as a statement of fact, not a declaration of who is best. You can say the same for FIP. The main difference is that if a pitcher is really good at inducing weak contact (obvious examples are Mariano Rivera, or any knuckleballer ever) their ERA will reflect that over a large sample. There's no chance of that being reflected in a pitcher's FIP. That's my main objection with using FIP (or fWAR) to evaluate pitchers.
 
manny said:
IMO, ERA should be looked at as a statement of fact, not a declaration of who is best. You can say the same for FIP. The main difference is that if a pitcher is really good at inducing weak contact (obvious examples are Mariano Rivera, or any knuckleballer ever) their ERA will reflect that over a large sample. There's no chance of that being reflected in a pitcher's FIP. That's my main objection with using FIP (or fWAR) to evaluate pitchers.
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Some people think a pitcher's performance should stand on its own, and not depend on the defense behind him.
 
And fip is just the simplest. We have many other stats which help us suss out quality of contact - xFIP, SIERA, xERA, and now new exit Velocity and other numbers too.
 
MindzEye said:
Bad analogy.

Better analogy: Who had the better year, the 49 goal scorer playing with bad teammates and highed xG or the 51 goal scorer playing with good teammates and lower xG?
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Ray finished with a 2.48 ERA. Cole was at 3.23. So to make your "better analogy" more relevant, you'd need to compare 49 goal scorer with a 64 goal scorer. Does it change your outlook?
 
zeke said:
That we should try to make individual awards about individual performance as best we can.
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Agreed. But FIP is not a complete measurement of individual performance. It tells part of the story.

As for the other stats you cited, I don't know whether Ray or Cole was better. We were talking about rWAR vs. bWAR. If there's a better case for Cole, I'm open to it but haven't seen it.
 
manny said:
Agreed. But FIP is not a complete measurement of individual performance. It tells part of the story.

As for the other stats you cited, I don't know whether Ray or Cole was better. We were talking about rWAR vs. bWAR. If there's a better case for Cole, I'm open to it but haven't seen it.
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Split the difference, at least.

Fangraphs also uses ra9 war, which just includes all runs and doesn't rely at all on the useless "errors" stat.
 
zeke said:
And fip is just the simplest. We have many other stats which help us suss out quality of contact - xFIP, SIERA, xERA, and now new exit Velocity and other numbers too.
Click to expand...

To be clear, I specifically mentioned DIPS, which is the entire category of defence indepentent stats, not strictly FIP. That's Manny's strawman, I never propped up FIP specifically.

xFIP
Ray: 3.36
Cole: 2.93

xERA
Ray: 3.55
Cole: 3.15

Hardhit%
Ray: 42.9%
Cole: 38.6%

Exit Velo
Ray: 90.7
Cole: 88.7

Cole generated less and lesser contact this year. Once the ball was in play though, the Jays defenders did a much better job taking care of their guy (the Jays had a good defence by all metrics this year, the Yankees somewhere between below average and bad.)
 
zeke said:
Split the difference, at least.

Fangraphs also uses ra9 war, which just includes all runs and doesn't rely at all on the useless "errors" stat.
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Fair enough. Without looking it up, I'd guess that Ray, Cole and Eovaldi (the fWAR superstar) are more fairly evaluated by ra9 war than they are by straight FIP, or fWAR.

I guess on the Cy Young question, I don't have that much of a problem with giving it to a guy who allows fewer runs because of luck and, to some extent, defense and, to some extent (probably) controlling quality of contact better that year. But YMMV.
 
MindzEye said:
To be clear, I specifically mentioned DIPS, which is the entire category of defence indepentent stats, not strictly FIP. That's Manny's strawman, I never propped up FIP specifically.

xFIP
Ray: 3.36
Cole: 2.93

xERA
Ray: 3.55
Cole: 3.15

Hardhit%
Ray: 42.9%
Cole: 38.6%

Exit Velo
Ray: 90.7
Cole: 88.7

Cole generated less and lesser contact this year. Once the ball was in play though, the Jays defenders did a much better job taking care of their guy (the Jays had a good defence by all metrics this year, the Yankees somewhere between below average and bad.)
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I referred to FIP because, as I said in the post that you appear to be arguing at, I don't get why people prefer fWAR to bWAR. I see that later you mentioned DIPS. DIPS is great! Is fWAR based on DIPS and not FIP? If so, mea culpa, I didn't think that it was.

DIPS It's probably more useful to you if you believe that a pitcher has very little influence over how well a ball is hit. Again, I think it is a good, but imperfect measure. So is ERA.
 
Except we know how hard the balls of the respective pitchers were hit...I posted it above.

We know who gave up more and harder contact, who struck out batters at a higher rate and walked batters at a lower rate.
 
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