And the verdict?

I'm pretty sure if I had failed your little test you would have made 30 or 40 posts about it, especially considering how many posts you made just to get me to answer.

Failed in what way?

I don't know. It was your experiment.

FIP is the best way to measure me with respect to things that I can control.

Exactly.

Posted by MikeT23 on 2/29/2012 9:35:00 PM (view original):
Anyone but me think jrdx is just poking at us?    Or does anyone think he is truly as dumb and baseball illiterate as he appears?

I'm going with the latter. I'm guessing he read a book or some articles on a couple new "super stats" and locked on to them, thinking they would make him a genius. Until he actually encountered people who know baseball, who know how ALL stats correlate and, also guys who, you know, actually saw players play.

43.7% of all statistics are made up.

That's why we can't put too much faith in any one or two stats.  You need to have a much broader understanding, including context and things that cannot be nicely measured by a number.

Posted by jrd_x on 2/29/2012 8:06:00 PM (view original):
I'll agree that ERA is flawed because it relies (though less directly than WHIP) on BABIP.

This is the part that has me continually shaking my head.

It's not that BABIP is flawed - it's just an incomplete stat. The numbers are accurate, but they're not an accurate reflection of ability because they don't measure everything. WHIP does. The only reason BABIP is a useless stat on its own is because it's a FRACTION of a WHOLE. WHIP is that WHOLE. When you have WHIP, it is completely pointless to even consider BABIP a stat.

It's like some of Mike's ridiculous examples. If you can measure HRs, does it really matter how many a guy hits in the daytime vs. at night? How many he hits into the upper deck as opposed to the first deck? You could get reliable numbers on those things, but they don't factor into any debate of how good a guy is, because we have the WHOLE stat we can look at - total HR.

WHIP is not the ultimate stat - but it's very accurate and reliable in telling us how many baserunners a pitcher allows. Couple it with ERA and you can get a very good sense of how effective a pitcher is. A perfect sense? No. That's why we have other stats and that's why we watch the games.

Some ideas for jrd to continue working on: Quality vs Quantity, and Partial vs. Whole.

Well, I didn't make any homer comparisons and I'd probably disagree with some of what you said.   Yes, when considering signing a player, it does matter if he's scraping fences or hitting bombs.   If your park dimensions are 5 ft deeper, he's hitting flyouts.   If you're the Cubs and guy can't hit during the day because he has blue eyes(Hamilton's excuse), you don't want him. 

Anyway, back to WHIP.   Good pitchers have good WHIP.   It's just a fact.   You don't see a guy with a 1.53 WHIP and think "Future HOFer".     With BABIP and FIP, that's not true.  They measure tiny portions of a pitcher's game.  And, as has been noted, both "punish" pitchers for different things.    Pitcher can give up homers and have a wonderful BABIP but, if you strike batters out, your BABIP is automatically worsened because those outs don't count.    However, your FIP will be much better because you DO strike batters out.    Those two stats aren't "advanced", they're just retarded.

Let me just note that Pete Vukovich won the Cy Young award (and placed 18th in the MVP voting) with a 1.502 WHIP.