Briefly Defining FIP And Presenting My Findings

I'll start off by briefly defining FIP, so you have a little bit of context behind the findings I'd like to publish here. FIP stands for Fielding Independent Pitching and in the most basic terms possible, is a replacement statistic for ERA that tries to evaluate the pitcher in a vacuum. This means when looking at this statistic we will not be taking into account the performance of the defense surrounding a pitcher, only the pitchers performance.

FIP is expressed as a number in the same way as ERA (0.00) so that we may have a good method of comparison between the two. FIP is also known as "ERA plus", and by that I mean, that's what I call it. It's a pitchers true ERA, better reflecting the run impact a pitcher had on his games that pure ERA by itself.

So, I may or may not go into more depth on FIP at a later date (I probably will) but right now I'm going to segue into my findings. Check in after the jump to see.

Pac-12 FIP Constant

Hello people, I just thought I would give you and update on a project I'm working on, although I guess an update on a project you didn't know existed is more of an announcement of said project...

Anyways, what I've been up to (since this morning) is deriving a league constant for the Pac-12 to be used in the Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) formula. For those of you who don't know what FIP is or how it's calculated, I'll write up a post on it and share it here before I reveal my Pac-12 constant.

The constant used when determining the FIP for a MLB pitcher generally hovers around 3.2 (it changes every season). I've gotten through WSU and UW in my statistics compilation and as of now the constant is at 3.38. If I had to guess, I'd say it ends up being somewhere in the 3.30-3.35 range, let's see how close I get!

I should be done with the stats tonight and have a constant, but I'll write up that FIP post first, to give a little insight into the stat.