Fielding independent pitching
type of baseball statistic
In baseball, fielding independent pitching (FIP) (also referred to as defense independent pitching (DIP)) is intended to measure a pitcher's effectiveness based only on statistics that do not involve fielders (except the catcher). These include home runs allowed, strikeouts, hit batters, walks, and, more recently, variations of FIP include fly ball percentage, ground ball percentage, and (to a much lesser extent) line drive percentage. By focusing on these statistics and ignoring what happens once a ball is put in play, which – on most plays – the pitcher has little control over, FIP claims to offer a clearer picture of the pitcher's true ability.
The most controversial part of FIP is the idea that pitchers have little influence over what happens to balls that are put into play. Some people believe this has been well-established (see below), primarily by showing the large variability of most pitchers' BABIP from year to year. However, there is a wide variation in career BABIP among pitchers, and this seems to correlate with career success. For instance, no pitcher in the Hall of Fame has a below-average career BABIP.
Formulae
Each of the following formulae uses innings pitched (IP), a measure of the number of outs a team made while a pitcher was in the game. Since most outs rely on fielding, the results from calculations using IP are not truly independent of team defense. While the creators of DICE, FIP and similar statistics all suggest they are "defense independent", others have pointed out that their formulas involve (IP). IP is a statistical measure of how many outs were made while a pitcher was pitching.
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