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Thursday, November 18, 2010
Reader Mail of the Day: you aren’t a graduate yet
While it’s admirable that you’re trying to push the envelope and develop more advanced statistics than the raw ones that most writers and such look at, it seems irresponsible to actually pretend that the ones you developed are as definitive as your readers seem to think. It’s comical how most “progressive” thinking baseball fans destroy writers for blindly following dated stats, but most of those people don’t even understand the alternatives they push and especially their defiencies. Namely, calculataing WAR from FIP and other defense “independent” stats. That in itself is an improper description. Instead of calling defense independant, it should be called strikeout, walk, hr, etc dependant ERA. In order to remove defense, you should be able to quantify it discreetly instead of throwing it out the window. You’re attempting a model reduction except you aren’t tracking a real number, you’re making one up. If you could create an ERA that takes into account batted ball data (not simple ld, gb, fb classifications but true velocities) and fielder f/x along with their initial placement and normalize it to a neutral park, then you’d have something you could definitively point to as defense independent.
Obviously you know all of that already, I just wish you’d let your readers in on the secret because most of them seem to be as dumb as the sports writers they loathe. I’m not saying you’re not doing good work trying to get there, but quite simply you’re not there and yet many people seem to think you are.
You are correct that the better term for FIP (fielding independent pitching) should be FBBSIP (fieldable batted ball and sequencing independent pitching). That is, we are only considering the subset of pitching that involves BB, HR, HB, SO, and excludes batted balls that are fieldable and excludes the sequencing of those events.
I have said this many many times. Many.
Tom