from Amazon
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Brian Bannister speaks “FIP”
This was last year. I would have thought that I linked to it, but I can’t find it. Enjoy an athlete who doesn’t repeat the Bull Durham cliches:
“Look at my xFIP,” he is saying as he pulls out a few pages he printed off the Internet site, “The Hardball Times.” ... “Look at that,” he says again. “I’m actually pitching better than I was last year. My xFIP is down. It’s just that I got lucky last year.”
The author of the piece is none other than Joe Poz (how lucky are we that at the intersection of athlete and saber-thought exists the one guy who gets it, and can articulate it for the mainstream reader) who concludes:
Then he stares at the numbers for another few seconds, and he offers a frustrated smile because he knows that, in the end, nobody else really cares about his xFIP. Nobody else really cares about his skyrocketing Left on Base Percentage. All anyone cares about is that he’s getting lit up. He’s giving up many more runs than he gave up last year. And Bannister knows that despite all his analysis and study, in this crazy pitching game, it really might be better to be lucky than good.
I have never read that article before, but that was definitely on of the best pieces I’ve read in a while. It would be interesting to see how other pitchers, guys who aren’t as data inclined as Bannister, go about trying to improve their pitching.