The Futility Infielder

Here we go again... for the third year in a row, I am presenting Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) via this website. DIPS was invented by an analyst named Voros McCracken, whose studies of pitching statistics suggest that major league pitchers do not differ greatly on their ability to prevent hits on balls in play. The rate at which a pitcher allows hits on balls in play has more to do with defense and luck than to his own skill, and can vary greatly from year to year.

This rather counterintuitive way of looking at pitching statistics has its advantages. The chief one is that it's been shown that we can do a better job of evaluating a pitcher's future performance by concentrating on the defense-independent things he does -- strike batters out, walk them, plunk them, and give up homers -- than we can by considering the effects of the defense playing behind him. The vehicle for this is the DIPS ERA (or dERA), which has been shown to correlate better with the following season's ERA than that pitcher's actual ERA.

If you've followed this site for the past couple of years, you've heard all of this before. DIPS has generated no shortage of controversy, but the work that's been done in its wake does far more to validate McCracken's central finding than to discredit it. It should be noted that McCracken is not saying major league pitchers do not control their ability to prevent hits on balls in play, just that they have less control than was assumed in a darker age.

The DIPS 2.0 system is a little long in the tooth, having been used for four years now as McCracken, who currently works as a consultant for the Boston Red Sox, is no longer updating it. Nonetheless, it's handy and straightforward enough (if not exactly simple) to merit keeping it in circulation. My annual preparation of the numbers is a project that yields equal parts awed fascination and spreadsheet-induced blindness at each stage. At some measure, the blissful tedium involved in their preparation tickles my opiate receptors; in the dead of winter, staring at spreadsheets of endless reams of baseball stats late at night is still pretty damn fun and addictive.

And I'm a pretty big geek, but what the hell -- this stuff is useful. So have at it.

As an aside, a few links pertaining to McCracken's work are temporarily being hosted on my site because they were lost in the server move from Baseball Primer to Baseball Think Factory. While I have McCracken's permission to do so and none of them will be mistaken for my own work, I am hopeful they will be restored to their rightful place in due time. DIPS is groundbreaking work that deserves better than to be lost in some "404 Not Found" shuffle.