Not all ERAs are created equal. If you’ve played fantasy baseball before-or know anything about how basic probability works-you know that a pitcher’s single-season ERA can be misleading. Two pitchers with the same ERA might have had vastly different seasons, which is why we need to look deeper if we want to determine a player’s true value.
Fortunately, we have ways of doing that. One of the easiest is to look at a pitcher’s Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), which estimates what a pitcher should have allowed independent of his defense and the timing of hits that he allowed. By comparing a pitcher’s ERA and FIP, we can find out who was lucky or unlucky and predict what kind of success he will have this season.
The following are the pitchers who had the largest negative difference between their ERA and FIP in 2017 among fantasy-relevant starters.
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Lance Lynn (FA)
2017 ERA: 3.33
2017 FIP: 4.82
Lynn is currently a free agent, and while the league market trend is likely to blame for that, his inflated FIP from 2017 doesn’t help. He posted his third consecutive sub-3.50 ERA season in 2017 (after missing 2016 recovering from Tommy John surgery), but the underlying numbers told a different story. His 7.39 K/9 and 19.7 strikeout percentage were both career lows, while his 3.77 BB/9 and 10.1 percent walk rate were both career highs. It’s hard to find success at the major league level when you’re striking out less than twice as many batters as you’re walking. Lynn managed to do so in 2017 thanks to a .244 BABIP-compared to his career .297 mark-and a 79 percent strand rate, significantly above the major league average of 73 percent. While he has managed to sustain high strand rates in the past, that was when he was striking out batters. It’s significantly harder to do so when you’re not.
Jake Odorizzi (MIL)
2017 ERA: 4.14
2017 FIP: 5.43
Odorizzi is another player who finds himself on the fringes of fantasy relevance, only the case because of the luck that he enjoyed in 2017. His FIP of 5.43 is more than a point higher than his ERA, which was already Odorizzi’s highest in a full season. The main culprit was his walking problem. More than 10 percent of batters to come to the plate against Odorizzi got a free pass to first base, far too many when he only struck out 21 percent of them. Fortunately, he was saved from a disaster of a season mainly due to luck-his .227 BABIP allowed was the lowest among pitchers who threw at least 200 innings. Without being able to count on that again in 2018, Odorizzi probably deserves his ranking in the upper double digits of pitchers.
Ervin Santana (MIN)
2017 ERA: 3.28
2017 FIP: 4.46
Santana was the poster boy for ERA regression in 2017, starting off the season on a completely unsustainable run before it caught up to him and his ERA returned to Earth. Because of that hot start, Santana finished the season with a highly respectable 3.28 ERA, but that was largely undeserved. Unlike the first two pitchers on this list, Santana kept his walk rate in check, but his strikeout rate of 19.3 percent (7.11 K/9) is just simply not good enough to support a sub-3.50 ERA. It was only due to luck that Santana had as productive of a season as he did. His .245 BABIP allowed was second-lowest (to Lynn) among qualified starters, and his strand rate of 79.5 percent was highest among pitchers who struck out less than 20 percent of batters. Santana is ranked just 56th in the Expert Consensus Rankings as of this writing. It’s clear that the expectation is for his 2018 ERA to be closer to last year’s FIP than last year’s ERA.
Gio Gonzalez (WAS)
2017 ERA: 2.96
2017 FIP: 3.93
Solely looking at ERA, Gonzalez was nearly as good as his two All-Star teammates in 2017. His 2.96 ERA was seventh-lowest among qualified starters, leading to him finishing sixth in NL Cy Young voting. While that’s all well and good, there’s a reason Gonzalez currently sits at 41st in the rankings among starting pitchers. That reason is his FIP. His strikeout and walk rates largely stayed the same from 2016, but his luck-based metrics saw significant changes, which is why his 2017 FIP of 3.93 isn’t all that far off from his 2016 FIP of 3.76 (when he had a 4.57 ERA). Gonzalez had the fourth-highest strand rate in the league at 81.6 percent and the sixth-lowest BABIP allowed of .258, both indicating that he’s due for significant regression in the upcoming season. Fortunately for him, that regression still means a sub-4.00 ERA, and the projections see him ending up just below there.
Dallas Keuchel (HOU)
2017 ERA: 2.90
2017 FIP: 3.79
You can’t win the World Series without a little luck. Keuchel, though, had a lot of luck in 2017. After his 3.87 FIP in 2016, it was expected that his 4.55 ERA would drop back closer to what he had produced in the previous two years. That did happen, but his 2017 FIP indicates it may have dropped more than what was deserved. Keuchel allowed a BABIP of .256 and stranded 79.9 percent of runners, which were 10th– and 13th-worst, respectively, among pitchers with at least 100 innings in 2017. His xFIP shows he got a little unlucky in the home run department, but with a career 15.3 percent home run per fly ball rate, it wasn’t that out of character for him. Given the 3.87 and 3.79 FIP he’s posted in the past two years and his 3.72 career mark, the smart bet is on his ERA to wind up closer to that region than to the 2.90 ERA he boasted in 2017. The projections agree, as he’s projected for a 3.63 ERA and is consequently ranked 19th in the latest version of the rankings.
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Brian Reiff is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Brian, check out his archive and follow him @briansreiff.
