Phillies use advanced stats: You should know what they are
By John Town
Pitching
- Fielding-Independent Pitching (FIP) – This is a statistic I constantly reference as I find it more reliable than ERA. It removes any influence a good or bad defender may have on a play by only looking at the three true outcomes: walks, strikeouts, and home runs. A pitcher who has a 4.50 ERA but a 3.25 FIP likely suffers from bad luck or poor fielding and should perform better in the future. FIP is scaled similarly to ERA, but computed in a different manner.
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- Expected Fielding-Independent Pitching (xFIP) – This almost exactly the same as FIP, but xFIP uses a league average amount of home runs rather than the actual number of home runs a pitcher allowed. It better accounts for fluctuations in home run rates, but FIP is used more often as home runs are often attributed to the pitcher.
- Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average (SIERA) – Rather than excluding batted balls like FIP and xFIP do, SIERA incorporates them into how it is calculated. The formula is quite complex, but it allows you to observe how often pitchers can create outs, via either strikeout or batted ball. Like the last two, it also scales with regular ERA.
- Pitch Values – Fangraphs’ pitch value statistic measures how valuable each pitcher’s individual pitch is. It is based on runs above or below average like other statistics mentioned earlier. There are both overall pitch values as well as corrected pitch values, which are based on a 100-pitch basis. Corey Kluber’s curveball had the best corrected value of all curveballs at 4.73, while Justin Verlander’s fastball was worth 33.5 runs above average overall.