ERA/FIP Visualization Tool
I’ve made an interactive visualization tool for earned run average (ERA) and fielding independent pitching (FIP) across Major League Baseball. You’ve seen this visualization before in many of Owen Watson’s articles throughout last season. Owen used this to suggest which pitching staffs might have overachieved their peripheral stats. This visualization lets us see the discrepancies between ERA and FIP among all of the MLB teams or even among different players.
Below is an example of a graph are you able to create with the tool:
You can toggle between teams and players. Players are organized by team and you are able to set the minimum number of innings pitched for the player to be on the graph. There are two places you’ll see these graphs. The primary location will be the tool’s page on FanGraphs; this is where the full tool is available. Then the graph itself can be embedded into our blog (plus Community Research) or anyone else’s blog using an iframe element.
For comparing players who are on different teams, there is also a feature to create a graph of custom players within the same year. Below is an ERA-FIP comparison of the 2015 NL Cy Young race. Zack Greinke had the largest discrepancy between his ERA and FIP, Jake Arrieta’s difference wasn’t quite as large, while Clayton Kershaw had the reverse of Greinke and Arrieta, where his FIP was lower than his ERA.
We are in the process of developing more interactive visualization tools, including this one. If you find any bugs or have a feature you’d like to see, please let us know.
I build things here.
🙂
Nice tool, I had fun trying it out. The dropdown menus that show FIP/ERA and Teams/Players were blank for me, though.
So if your FIP is higher than your ERA, that means that your performance as a pitcher was really way worse than what your ERA makes it seem, in other words you had a boatload of help from your defense?
The other way around, an ERA higher than you FIP, means that as a pitcher you actually performed better than your ERA states, and the defense behind you let you down?
In broad strokes, do I have this right? Just making sure I get it.
Essentially, as I understand it, FIP basically only takes into account pitching-specific factors like HR given up, walks, and strikeouts. Granted, HR given up can be a park factor. But by and large, it removes the chance of single-double-triple being produced by fielding error by not accounting for it entirely.
And to take further, xFIP basically tries to remove some of the luck of FB turning into HR, in some ways moving the xFIP to a simple evaluation of walks, strikeouts while replacing HR with (IIRC) league HR/FB * pitcher’s FB% – which could be summarized as their FB% or GB%. That’s why you hear people so often just going back to looking at the basic K-BB, K/9, BB/9, FB%, and GB%.
Presumptively, the FIP negates defense. However, a huge set of uncontrolled factors are at play: the park, the opposition, etc. I wouldn’t expect an AL East team’s ERA/FIP to be the same as an NL East team’s for example. How best can this be synthesized?
Some of the scales are thrown off where there are teams that have a specific player that logged an insanely high ERA on minimal amount of innings pitched. The scale shows by the 10 of runs rather than the couple of runs shown above.