It's time to talk about the Sox young pitching

[turnin' two]

11 minutes ago, Eminor3rd said:

The shade being tossed at Lopez is because his 2.44 ERA is against a 4.54 FIP and a 5.28 xFIP.

What this means, essentially, is that (1) his K/BB ratio suggests he does not deserve an ERA that low, and (2) he has given up far fewer homeruns than would be expected given his ballpark and the current offensive environment of the league. This makes him, on paper, a prime candidate for regression, because if he keeps performing the same as he has been, you'd expect him to give up more homers and for more of his balls in play to become hits going forward.

He needs to strike more dudes out (and walk a few less) to avoid this.

Isn't that exactly what I said in my first post on the subject?

 

To say, because of his xFIP, he is one of the two worst pitchers in starting pitchers in baseball is dramatic and incorrect.  Does he have things on which he can improve?  Yeah, of course, he is 24 and in his first full season.  But the hyperbole is overkill.  For the most part he has been effective on he mound and in spite of his flyball rate, his OPS against and exit velocity against are above average and may balance those other numbers out, because guys aren't hitting him hard.

Edited May 14, 2018 by turnin' two

[Dam8610]

7 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

*claps hands* Exactly. FIP and xFIP are predictive, as in they tell you what is likely to happen in the future. ERA and ERA+ (or ERA- if you want to use that) tell you what happened  so far, and are not predictive stats. 

ERA is predictive, just less predictive than FIP or xFIP.

[Chicago White Sox]

1 minute ago, Jack Parkman said:

*claps hands* Exactly. FIP and xFIP are predictive, as in they tell you what is likely to happen in the future. ERA and ERA+ (or ERA- if you want to use that) tell you what happened  so far, and are not predictive stats. 

FIP & xFIP are predictors of ERA at current K, BB, & HR rates, but there is nothing to suggest Lopez’s FIP won’t improve as he continues to develop.  Therefore, it’s a little misleading to say FIP is going to tell you what’s likely to happen for a 24 year old who is very likely to improve his K rate & command.  Also missing from the FIP equation is the quality of contact and IMO teams haven’t really been able to square up on Lopez’s stuff.  I think jumping to conclusions based on someone’s s FIP six weeks into the season is a poor way to evaluate a young player’s progress.

[TaylorStSox]

37 minutes ago, soxfan49 said:

He had that California Cool attitude. My dad used to hate his attitude when he was bad but would love him otherwise. Not sure I'd ever question a pro athlete's drive unless it was admitted by the player.

Yeah, I don't disagree. I just struggle to see how a guy with that kind of stuff didn't have a better career. He had a good career, but he had better potential. 

[southsider2k5]

3 minutes ago, Chicago White Sox said:

FIP & xFIP are predictors of ERA at current K, BB, & HR rates, but there is nothing to suggest Lopez’s FIP won’t improve as he continues to develop.  Therefore, it’s a little misleading to say FIP is going to tell you what’s likely to happen for a 24 year old who is very likely to improve his K rate & command.  Also missing from the FIP equation is the quality of contact and IMO teams haven’t really been able to square up on Lopez’s stuff.  I think jumping to conclusions based on someone’s s FIP six weeks into the season is a poor way to evaluate a young player’s progress.

You are on to something here, and that is that predictive stats aren't nearly as useful with SSS's. 

[turnin' two]

7 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

*claps hands* Exactly. FIP and xFIP are predictive, as in they tell you what is likely to happen in the future. ERA and ERA+ (or ERA- if you want to use that) tell you what happened  so far, and are not predictive stats. 

Hmmm, but are they really that predictive?   You could guess if a guy is going to out perform or under perform his FIP and xFIP just based in his K stats and be pretty darn good at it.  Hmm, could there be outliers?  Yes!  Extreme ground ball pitchers.

Mark Buehrle's numbers were pretty much always better than his FIP and xFIP.  Jeff Samardizja routinely has better FIP and xFIP numbers.  They aren't really that predictive, they are representative of the type of pitcher a guy is.  A low FIP means high Ks or lots of ground balls.  That is it.  In some ways can that be predictive, sure.  Would Lopez be a good fit for Camden right now?  No.  Would Dallas Keuchel, certainly moreso.

 

People try to make FIP and xFIP more than they are all the time.  They aren't magic.  They don't tell the future.  They are based off the past just like ERA. And they are normalized by using ERA.

[turnin' two]

6 minutes ago, Chicago White Sox said:

FIP & xFIP are predictors of ERA at current K, BB, & HR rates, but there is nothing to suggest Lopez’s FIP won’t improve as he continues to develop.  Therefore, it’s a little misleading to say FIP is going to tell you what’s likely to happen for a 24 year old who is very likely to improve his K rate & command.  Also missing from the FIP equation is the quality of contact and IMO teams haven’t really been able to square up on Lopez’s stuff.  I think jumping to conclusions based on someone’s s FIP six weeks into the season is a poor way to evaluate a young player’s progress.

Thank you, I agree and you said it better than my attempts.

[ptatc]

33 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

*claps hands* Exactly. FIP and xFIP are predictive, as in they tell you what is likely to happen in the future. ERA and ERA+ (or ERA- if you want to use that) tell you what happened  so far, and are not predictive stats. 

Where is the research that shows it predicts anything besides FIP or xFIP. The most important thing for a pitcher is to prevent runs from scoring. Does it have any predictive value there? Or is it simply "we think if you strikeout more and walk less batters, you will give up fewer runs."

[ptatc]

20 minutes ago, turnin' two said:

Hmmm, but are they really that predictive?   You could guess if a guy is going to out perform or under perform his FIP and xFIP just based in his K stats and be pretty darn good at it.  Hmm, could there be outliers?  Yes!  Extreme ground ball pitchers.

Mark Buehrle's numbers were pretty much always better than his FIP and xFIP.  Jeff Samardizja routinely has better FIP and xFIP numbers.  They aren't really that predictive, they are representative of the type of pitcher a guy is.  A low FIP means high Ks or lots of ground balls.  That is it.  In some ways can that be predictive, sure.  Would Lopez be a good fit for Camden right now?  No.  Would Dallas Keuchel, certainly moreso.

 

People try to make FIP and xFIP more than they are all the time.  They aren't magic.  They don't tell the future.  They are based off the past just like ERA. And they are normalized by using ERA.

This too.

[Eminor3rd]

5 minutes ago, turnin' two said:

Isn't that exactly what I said in my first post on the subject?

 

To say, because of his xFIP, he is one of the two worst pitchers in starting pitchers in baseball is dramatic and incorrect.  Does he have things on which he can improve?  Yeah, of course, he is 24 and in his first full season.  But the hyperbole is overkill.

It is hyperbole to say he's among the worst SPs in baseball, but based on his peripherals, it isn't as far off as you might think. You don't have to think of it as "because of his xFIP," but the guy is has only struck out 6 batters per nine, while walking nearly 4 batters per nine, both numbers which are significantly below average for starters in today's game. Add that to the fact that just 9% of his flyballs have been homers (despite being in a park that generally boosts homers), and it's easy to see that his results need to improve if he's going to contuine to see a low ERA.

He has a low ERA, but he hasn't pitched particularly well.

[Eminor3rd]

39 minutes ago, Chicago White Sox said:

FIP & xFIP are predictors of ERA at current K, BB, & HR rates, but there is nothing to suggest Lopez’s FIP won’t improve as he continues to develop.  Therefore, it’s a little misleading to say FIP is going to tell you what’s likely to happen for a 24 year old who is very likely to improve his K rate & command.  Also missing from the FIP equation is the quality of contact and IMO teams haven’t really been able to square up on Lopez’s stuff.  I think jumping to conclusions based on someone’s s FIP six weeks into the season is a poor way to evaluate a young player’s progress.

Well, not if the claim being made is that he will need to improve those things in order to continue to see success. It isn't an SSS issue to say that the way he's been pitching is not in line with his current ERA.

[Eminor3rd]

29 minutes ago, ptatc said:

Where is the research that shows it predicts anything besides FIP or xFIP. The most important thing for a pitcher is to prevent runs from scoring. Does it have any predictive value there? Or is it simply "we think if you strikeout more and walk less batters, you will give up fewer runs."

There are related studies in Baseball Between the Numbers and The Book, two awesome books that broke a lot of OG sabermetric studies that form the basis of much that's still used today. Unfortunately, the articles from both books aren't available for free online. I own and have read both of these --they're fascinating reads to this day, even though many of the concepts have been improved on since their release.

In short, the basis for the use of walks/strikeouts/homeruns came from studies performed by Voros McCracken that showed those rates as stable predictors of their own future values in later years, whereas ERA (and most other commonly used stats) were not. I don't remember off the top of my head how they accurately scaled FIP to ERA, but the end result was the FIP predicts future ERA better than ERA predicts future ERA.

Now, the important distinction here is that this is only going to hold true if the relevant rates (walks/strikeouts/homeruns) hold steady. So the statement "his performance suggests he will regress" is less accurate than the statement "if he continues to pitch as he has been pitching, his performance suggests he will regress." In other words, if you think that Reynaldo Lopez will improve/refine his command and thus strike more guys out/walk fewer guys/continue to repress homeruns going forward, you may not believe that will regress. But it IS accurate to suggest that he has not shown the characteristics of a sub-3 ERA pitcher so far.

Edited May 14, 2018 by Eminor3rd

[Eminor3rd]

49 minutes ago, turnin' two said:

Hmmm, but are they really that predictive?   You could guess if a guy is going to out perform or under perform his FIP and xFIP just based in his K stats and be pretty darn good at it.  Hmm, could there be outliers?  Yes!  Extreme ground ball pitchers.

Mark Buehrle's numbers were pretty much always better than his FIP and xFIP.  Jeff Samardizja routinely has better FIP and xFIP numbers.  They aren't really that predictive, they are representative of the type of pitcher a guy is.  A low FIP means high Ks or lots of ground balls.  That is it.  In some ways can that be predictive, sure.  Would Lopez be a good fit for Camden right now?  No.  Would Dallas Keuchel, certainly moreso.

 

People try to make FIP and xFIP more than they are all the time.  They aren't magic.  They don't tell the future.  They are based off the past just like ERA. And they are normalized by using ERA.

Pointing out a couple exceptions to a rule doesn't invalidate the rule. It's possible that Lopez may turn out to be another exception, but if you were going to make that case, the burden would be on you to provide evidence.

Until there's a reason to believe a guy is abnormal, it's much more likely that he is normal.

[chitownsportsfan]

Buehrle is one of the only guys ever that didn't regress to his dip stats.  A real outlier.  

 

Although there is some research being done that suggests some pitchers can outpitch their peripherals they are also outliers like buerhle.

Edited May 14, 2018 by chitownsportsfan

[caulfield12]

Well, one would be lower exit velocity #’s for batted balls in play...that correlates more with his low/er BABIP.

[ChiSox59]

Between Rodon, Giolito, Lopez, Fulmer, Hansen, Cease, Dunning, Adams, Clarkin, Stephens, Guerrero, Puckett, I am pretty certain they can find 5 very good rotation options.

The ones that don't stick in the rotation join Burdi, Hamilton, Johnson, Vieria, Fry, and Bummer in the pen.

There is a world of depth and talent there.  I just listed 18 guys that the Sox control long term and are all legit major league prospects.  The pitching is the least of my concerns. 

[Chicago White Sox]

6 minutes ago, caulfield12 said:

Well, one would be lower exit velocity #’s for batted balls in play...that correlates more with his low/er BABIP.

I agree with this.  I love FIP & use it all the time (it really is one of my favorite stats), but it’s not perfect as it does not factor in a pitcher’s ability to induce weak contact.  Given how accurate FIP is generally speaking, maybe that’s not a huge issue, but it definitely leaves open the possibility of outliers.

[Chicago White Sox]

37 minutes ago, Eminor3rd said:

Well, not if the claim being made is that he will need to improve those things in order to continue to see success. It isn't an SSS issue to say that the way he's been pitching is not in line with his current ERA.

I don’t disagree with anything you say here.  His ERA is certaintly better than it should be, but at the same time I think the quality of contact would suggest he may be outperforming his FIP to some extent.

Ultimately I just don’t think his FIP after seven games is going to be predictive of his full season performance.  I think his minor league peripherals are far better indicators of future performance even if you rightfully assume some level of haircut on them.

[Jack Parkman]

1 hour ago, ptatc said:

Where is the research that shows it predicts anything besides FIP or xFIP. The most important thing for a pitcher is to prevent runs from scoring. Does it have any predictive value there? Or is it simply "we think if you strikeout more and walk less batters, you will give up fewer runs."

Actually there is a strong correlation with striking out hitters, not walking hitters, not giving up HRs and run prevention. Those who give up the fewest runs consistently do those 3 things well. That is the basis of FIP and xFIP.  Conversely, pitchers who pitch to contact have less consistent results. Look at Buehrle for instance. He was more good than bad but had some awful seasons mixed in. When you pitch to contact, success is more luck than skill. Contact pitchers can have great individual seasons but they aren't really great year after year. Pitchers with great stuff that miss bats are more consistently great and have a smaller standard deviation from season to season. 

Edited May 14, 2018 by Jack Parkman

[Dam8610]

1 hour ago, turnin' two said:

Hmmm, but are they really that predictive?   You could guess if a guy is going to out perform or under perform his FIP and xFIP just based in his K stats and be pretty darn good at it.  Hmm, could there be outliers?  Yes!  Extreme ground ball pitchers.

Mark Buehrle's numbers were pretty much always better than his FIP and xFIP.  Jeff Samardizja routinely has better FIP and xFIP numbers.  They aren't really that predictive, they are representative of the type of pitcher a guy is.  A low FIP means high Ks or lots of ground balls.  That is it.  In some ways can that be predictive, sure.  Would Lopez be a good fit for Camden right now?  No.  Would Dallas Keuchel, certainly moreso.

 

People try to make FIP and xFIP more than they are all the time.  They aren't magic.  They don't tell the future.  They are based off the past just like ERA. And they are normalized by using ERA.

Mark Buehrle was a great defender as a pitcher and that was how he consistently outperformed his FIP. Someone, I think Fangraphs, wrote a whole article about how Buehrle defied logic by outperforming his FIP by a full run throughout his career. They concluded that his great defense and excellent pickoff move were the culprits for this, and said that any pitcher that had those traits moving forward would also likely outperform their FIP. You don't discount a statistical analysis because of outliers. Statistical analysis doesn't look at outliers for that exact reason: they don't come along often and will skew the data.

[turnin' two]

1 hour ago, Eminor3rd said:

Pointing out a couple exceptions to a rule doesn't invalidate the rule. It's possible that Lopez may turn out to be another exception, but if you were going to make that case, the burden would be on you to provide evidence.

Until there's a reason to believe a guy is abnormal, it's much more likely that he is normal.

Yeah, obviously.  There are likely hundreds though. Those were just the first 2 I checked. I bet there are a lot of guys for which the numbers are close, but for the most part, high K's = good FIP (and xFIP).   Good GO/AO = good FIP and xFIP.  They are completely superfluous stats.  

[Eminor3rd]

2 minutes ago, turnin' two said:

Yeah, obviously.  There are likely hundreds though. Those were just the first 2 I checked. I bet there are a lot of guys for which the numbers are close, but for the most part, high K's = good FIP (and xFIP).   Good GO/AO = good FIP and xFIP.  They are completely superfluous stats.  

That would depend on your definition of "lots." There may (or may not) be hundreds over the course of baseball history, but it isn't "most," which is the whole point. 

They're not superfluous. If I asked you, "does pitcher X's ERA seem sustainable?" you wouldn't be able to answer accurately by telling me whether or not his K's were high. The reason it exists in the from it does is so that it can combine predictive factors and scale it to be on par with ERA. A guy could have high strikeouts but still suck because he walks too many batters. How could you tell if the walks were high enough to cancel out the strikeouts? You use FIP (or something similar). 

Also, flyball rate has nothing to do with FIP or xFIP. You might be thinking of HR/FB%, which does.

[turnin' two]

1 hour ago, chitownsportsfan said:

Buehrle is one of the only guys ever that didn't regress to his dip stats.  A real outlier.  

 

Although there is some research being done that suggests some pitchers can outpitch their peripherals they are also outliers like buerhle.

Hmm.  Doesn't seem right.  Think of a good pitcher that didn't K a lot of guys and check his numbers.  The next guy I though of was Tom Glavine.  Routinely outperformed his FIP numbers.  

Next guy I thought of, Cole Hamels, same deal. 

Kyle Hendricks.  Maybe jury is still out, but so far, just about every year.

You could do the same on the other side.  Without looking I bet guys like Kerry Wood and Javier Vazquez routinely under performed.

It isn't exactly going out on a limb to say that Lopez's ERA is going to climb.  If he were to maintain this ERA, well, it would be pretty elite.  I'd be shocked.  I would also be pretty darn surprised if he pitched to a 5 ERA the remainder of the season.  Do you think he has pitched like a 5.5 ERA pitcher?  I don't.  He has looked much more in control of what is happening than Giolito or Fulmer.  

[ptatc]

1 hour ago, Eminor3rd said:

There are related studies in Baseball Between the Numbers and The Book, two awesome books that broke a lot of OG sabermetric studies that form the basis of much that's still used today. Unfortunately, the articles from both books aren't available for free online. I own and have read both of these --they're fascinating reads to this day, even though many of the concepts have been improved on since their release.

In short, the basis for the use of walks/strikeouts/homeruns came from studies performed by Voros McCracken that showed those rates as stable predictors of their own future values in later years, whereas ERA (and most other commonly used stats) were not. I don't remember off the top of my head how they accurately scaled FIP to ERA, but the end result was the FIP predicts future ERA better than ERA predicts future ERA.

Now, the important distinction here is that this is only going to hold true if the relevant rates (walks/strikeouts/homeruns) hold steady. So the statement "his performance suggests he will regress" is less accurate than the statement "if he continues to pitch as he has been pitching, his performance suggests he will regress." In other words, if you think that Reynaldo Lopez will improve/refine his command and thus strike more guys out/walk fewer guys/continue to repress homeruns going forward, you may not believe that will regress. But it IS accurate to suggest that he has not shown the characteristics of a sub-3 ERA pitcher so far.

This is what I've seen as well and is part of the issue. People look at FIP because it is better than looking at ERA. However, the only thing FIP predictsis ERA.

So you are correct in saying that that FIP doesn't really predict future performance. FIP only states that if the strikeout/walk ratio doesn't change he is likely to have a higher ERA.  However, it seems fairly common sense that the more batter you walk (and don't negate with strikeouts) the more likely you are to have a higher ERA.

Thus a higher FIP doesn't truly predict much of anything. Thus it is accurate to say he has given up fewer runs than the K/BB ratio says he should, whether that is due to good defense, weather conditions or just plain luck.

[turnin' two]

1 hour ago, Dam8610 said:

Mark Buehrle was a great defender as a pitcher and that was how he consistently outperformed his FIP. Someone, I think Fangraphs, wrote a whole article about how Buehrle defied logic by outperforming his FIP by a full run throughout his career. They concluded that his great defense and excellent pickoff move were the culprits for this, and said that any pitcher that had those traits moving forward would also likely outperform their FIP. You don't discount a statistical analysis because of outliers. Statistical analysis doesn't look at outliers for that exact reason: they don't come along often and will skew the data.

There are plenty of outliers.

Buehrle picked off 100 guys in his career.  That equates to about 6 per year.  That seems like a stretch to say it is a major factor.  His defense was great.  He made on average 11 putouts per season.  So he equated for 17 puts per year with his defense and pickoffs.   I don't know.  Seems like kind of a stretch to me.   I guess I would like to see the article though.

Edited May 14, 2018 by turnin' two