In the baseball world, one of the go-to measures to predict future pitcher performance is fielding independent pitching (FIP). It’s easy to access, read, and understand—a quick and simple way to ‘predict the future’ of pitchers. But, FIP is far from perfect. Take Chris Young, the 6’10” Royals starter, who ‘broke’ FIP. Young, an extreme fly ball pitcher, was pegged with a 5.02 FIP in 2014 and 4.52 FIP in 2015, but blew away expectations to the tune of a 3.65 and 3.06 ERA in those two seasons. Pitchers like Young have a knack for breaking FIP and consistently overachieve the metric’s expectations.
But how about the other end of the scale? The underachievers, who always have their ERA well above their FIP and are expected to improve each year, yet never seem to. This isn’t to say that the pitcher is underachieving, just that through the lens of FIP, they should be doing better. Much of the time, these cases are a bit like Chris Young’s—it’s not them, it’s FIP.
This ‘breaking’ of FIP (and other defensive independent pitching statistics, or DIPS) can produce plenty of frustration among fans and analysts alike. It’s hard to tell when FIP isn’t a reliable statistic for evaluating certain pitchers, and when it’s time to stop using fielding independent pitching as evidence of an eventual breakout. It looks like we’ve reached that point for two Yankees pitchers, Nathan Eovaldi and Michael Pineda.
These two rotation mates are undoubtedly talented and could certainly ‘break out’ one day, but saying that we know this because of FIP just isn’t true. Although their FIP and xFIP point towards a bright future, Pineda and Eovaldi continually perform below expectations. We can’t help but hope for improvement when the FIP is lower than the ERA, which makes these rotation mates all the more frustrating to watch when the ERA never falls to meet the peripherals.
| Nathan Eovaldi | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ERA | FIP | xFIP | |
| 2014 | 4.37 | 3.37 | 3.78 |
| 2015 | 4.2 | 3.42 | 3.81 |
| 2016 | 4.44 | 3.76 | 3.24 |
| Michael Pineda | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ERA | FIP | xFIP | |
| 2014 | 1.89 | 2.71 | 3.37 |
| 2015 | 4.37 | 3.34 | 2.95 |
| 2016 | 6.34 | 4.51 | 3.5 |
Other than Pineda’s unbelievable 2014 in which he walked seven batters in 76.1 innings and did a whole lot of other unsustainable things, there’s a clear trend here for both pitchers: a lackluster-to-bad ERA but a promising FIP that never seems to become a reality. It’s a puzzling situation, though there may be an answer for why both pitchers seem to continually underachieve FIP.
As fancy as fielding independent pitching may sound, it’s really not that hard to grasp.
FIP = ((13*HR)+(3*(BB+HBP))-(2*K))/IP + constant
FIP is centered around homeruns, walks, and strikeouts (plus a constant that puts FIP onto the ERA scale and is the same for every pitcher in a given year; usually about 3.10). The key to FIP, and to Eovaldi and Pineda’s situation, is that it essentially isolates the pitchers from balls in play—giving them a league average BABIP. In many, or most, cases, this can be useful, as what happens to balls in play is often based on luck, skewing the overall numbers of pitchers. But for Eovaldi and Pineda, assuming they’ll have a league average BABIP is a mistake.
| Nathan Eovaldi’s BABIP | Michael Pineda’s BABIP | League Average BABIP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 0.323 | 0.233 | 0.296 |
| 2015 | 0.337 | 0.332 | 0.297 |
| 2016 | 0.301 | 0.378 | 0.296 |
Once again, we can ignore Pineda’s 2014 numbers because that year was a fluke, and instead focus on the big picture. These two starters are still young enough that there isn’t a ton of data to go off of, so while I’d rather not have to include Pineda’s 2014 or either of their 2016’s, that wouldn’t leave us with much data. The purpose of this table is to point out that both pitchers consistently have a high BABIP. BABIP stabilizes at about 1000 balls in play, so at this point we can assume that Eovaldi’s career .315 BABIP is here to stay. Pineda’s career numbers are out of whack because of 2014, but he also has a tendency to have a high BABIP.
FIP assumes that the two pitchers will eventually have a league average BABIP, but in all likelihood they won’t. While there is luck involved with BABIP, there is skill as well, and Pineda and Eovaldi allow enough hard contact that we have to accept they’ll always have higher batting average on balls in play than most.
There exists other reasons for why FIP doesn’t work that well for the two pitchers. In Eovaldi’s case, his lack of success against lefties is going to skew his BABIP, and in turn, his FIP. Eovaldi also has the sixth highest H/9 since 2014, which will impact his ERA but not his FIP. For Pineda, his high home run rate that will probably never decrease to league average is going to confuse his xFIP (which tries to ignore individual home run rates). In addition, Pineda has always shown a knack for limiting walks and striking hitters out, resulting in the second best K/BB mark in baseball last season and a top-25 mark this season. Eovaldi isn’t quite as elite there, but he has a top-15 K/BB this season. Less walks and more strikeouts are great, and you can see why that may decrease an FIP. The problem is that Pineda’s been known to limit walks at the expense of too many pitches in the zone, which can lead to more hard contact and home runs. FIP can’t know that while the walks are nice, they’re hurting Pineda in other ways.
Up to this point, we simply can’t trust fielding independent pitching when it comes to Pineda and Eovaldi. This isn’t to say that both pitchers will never be able to perform to the level that FIP indicates they will, and these two Yankees starters aren’t exactly bad, per se (okay, maybe Pineda is right now). But when discussing future performance of these two, referencing FIP is useless. It can be helpful for a lot of pitchers, but Pineda and Eovaldi buck the trend with their unique profiles.
Photo: Adam Hunger / USATSI