do we really believe that telling zack that strikeouts are good and walks and homers are bad really helped his pitching? Those are the elements that going into determining FIP…but that shits obvious. Even trey knows that stuff.

Bannister said, “Zone rating outfield > zone rating infield”, but I read it as “We’re very scared of letting batted balls go to the infield, as a rotation.”

to see if the data correlates with what they’re saying. I’m too lazy to actually do it, just saying it would be interesting if I were to.

but Zack appears to prefer FIP, so I’m thinking that he believes he has some control over whether a fly ball goes over the wall or not—at least in big parks like the K. His HR rate dropped starting in the second half of 2008 so it’s a 1.5 year sample size. He was quoted in an article during the season as saying he found out in 2008 “where he got beat a lot,” and he obviously made the adjustment that led to the HR rate drop.

While HR/FB might be random for the general population of pitchers, for individuals with the right skill set, it’s possible that HR rate can be moderately controlled. Tom Glavine in his Braves days was famous for only pitching to the outside half for a long time so he wouldn’t miss over the plate as much as when pitching inside, and he sustained a low HR rate for quite a long time. Tim Lincecum, in a smaller sample size, over the last two years has maintained a 5.5% HR/FB rate. BABIP for pitchers can be statistically significant over long periods of time, so it’s possible that HR/FB could be too, although I’m personally too lazy to do the research.

just decide to cut your walk rate, your home run rate, and increase your strikeout rate, and then actually do all of those things.

It’s missing bats versus pitch to contact, and then within pitch to contact, it’s groundballs versus fly balls (which normally a pitcher would want more groundballs, but if your infield defense is the 2009 Royals infield defense, fly balls are not necessarily bad). Type of pitch and location highly affect whether a batted ball is a grounder or a fly. HR/9 is one of the components, and while the rate at which flyballs become HRs is generally the same (with ballpark as a major influence), the number of flyballs allowed is under the pitcher’s control — the fewer the flyballs, the fewer the HRs.

His FIP conversation with Kepner is around 9 minutes in:
http://videos.kansascity.com/vmix_hosted_apps/p/media?id=7371500
He says he wondered whether the writers would realize that Felix had good luck with his ERA because of Seattle’s great defense.

Also amusing is where he talks about learning from two pitchers on opposing teams of undisclosed identity because he doesn’t want to get those guys in trouble. I bet one of them is Mark Buerhle, since Zack described him as “amazing” but with “not great stuff,” and the two of them, along with Justin Verlander, were chatting quite a bit during the ASG workouts.

and just ‘hitters hitting pitchers pitches’