A fan of the Yankees, Red Sox, and large sample sizes.

 
DEFENSE INDEPENDENT PITCHING STATISTICS

Looks like someone else will be doing the DIPS daily dirty work this year, which means I don't have to. Not that my DIPS updates were anywhere near daily, anyways. I'm going to leave the link at the left active, so that you can use last year's DIPS numbers as a reference this year. Combining them (and 2002 numbers, in theory) with this year's data is the best way to judge pitchers. Kind of the like the Voltron (Power Rangers for you teenie-boppers) of pitcher analysis.

In case you're new to DIPS, it's a (pretty accurate) theory which basically says that while pitcher skills includes walk rate, strikout rate, and homerun rate, hit rate on balls in play (singles, doubles, triples) isn't really much of a pitcher skill. Batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is more a measure of team fielding ability, home ballpark, and statistical variance ("luck"). Early in the year, a pitcher may give up more than his fair share of dinky singles, thus raising his ERA when he's shown the same skill as a similar pitcher with better luck. DIPS also takes into account the fact that equal amounts of the raw ingredients of scoring (walks, homeruns, singles, stolen bases, etc) don't always yield the same number of runs. In the short term, flukey things like a walk before a homerun versus a homerun before a walk play games with a pitcher's ERA. Even over a whole year these things don't even out.

So, in conclusion, a DIPS ERA (dERA) is the best measure of a pitcher's actual shown ability. It's a better indication of future ERA than actual ERA. When making judgments about pitchers (say, for fantasy baseball) use it instead of ERA.

Posted by Sky at 10:16 PM | 0 comments