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Some FIP for NPB

May 28th, 2008 Shinsano · 5 Comments

Simon’s got a great post up over at his blog outlining some NPB metrics. It’s a little hard to cut and paste the entire thing, so I’m just going to include the FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) numbers here.

FIP ERA W L Pitcher Team
1.61 2.85 4 3 Sugiuchi Hawks
2.02 2.05 7 2 Iwakuma Eagles
2.41 2.27 6 4 Lewis Carp
2.76 1.52 5 1 Darvish Fighters
2.82 3.1 5 3 Tanaka Eagles
2.93 3.56 2 3 Utsumi Giants
2.97 2.9 4 4 Shimizu Marines
2.99 2.07 3 2 Naruse Marines
3.07 1.68 5 1 Iwata Tigers
3.07 1.75 5 0 Hoashi Lions
3.09 1.99 2 5 Miura BayStars

An FIP of 1.61? Unreal, and…impossible to maintain. As a point of comparison, as great a year as Cliff Lee has had this year, he’s been in the low 2s, and is now closer to the mid 2s. Jake Peavy won the Cy Young award with a 2.84.

I had some idea that Toshiya Sugiuchi was pitching well, but not like this. He’s only 4-3 on the year, playing for a fairly mediocre SoftBank Hawks. Hisashi Iwakuma is having a great year too, and as Simon has pointed out, is a big part of the Eagles surge this year. Yu Darvish is looking very solid, although I think we can expect his 1.52 ERA to eventually come up a little.

On the flip side we have Tetsuya Utsumi, who in playing for the worst defensive team in the league (the Giants have a defensive efficiency rating of .669) has a higher ERA than he probably deserves. Koji Uehara was all-around-bad prior to his demotion, but the Giants defense is definitely something for teams to keep in mind this off-season when they consider signing Uehara.

Tags: Baseball - Japan

5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Buck // May 28, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    What on earth is Fielding Independent Pitching?

  • 2 simon // May 28, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    Here:
    http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/statpages/glossary/#fip

    It’s supposed to measure a pitcher’s ability while removing the influence of the defense behind him. While it’s far from a perfect metric (there probably isn’t one, even though sabermetricians try to come up with the grand unified stat), it does a better job than a pitcher’s ERA and W-L record in evaluating his performance.

    I used a constant of 3 due to the lower scoring nature of NPB, but it’s just designed to look like an ERA and not really comparable to ERA itself.

  • 3 Shinsano // May 28, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    Thanks for asking Buck. I like some of the sabermetric statistics, and while I’m wary of going to great lengths to explain every statistic I put on EWC, I don’t want to be a alienating dick either.
    FIP should be called Pitching Independent Fielding. Like Simon says it reveals a pitcher’s true performance a little better than ERA does. Utsumi is a great example. Put him on Rakuten and he probably has a lower ERA.

  • 4 Buck // May 29, 2008 at 5:05 am

    But how do you determine who has a good defense or not? Just Fielding%, or does it take in consideration home/away stadium dimentions, opponent strength etc.? Just curious. As far as I’m concerned, the more stats that get to the true value/quality of a player,the better.

  • 5 simon // May 29, 2008 at 10:34 am

    I cover DER (Defensive Efficiency Rating) in my post that’s linked from this post.
    http://jhockey.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/2008527-npb-update/

    It’s basically the opposite from BABIP (batting average for ball in play) for defense. While not perfect (no stat is), it’s a better measure than fielding percentage where simultaneously the difference between teams is negligible and “errors” are the most subjective stats in baseball, quite dependent on the official scorer (the home scorer often judges a play as an error or a hit depending on who was the culprit.)
    http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?search=DEF_EFF

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