Deconstructing WHIP

and the comment then uses WHIP to show how tRA is flawed.

WHIP is exactly the sort of statistic these people should be yelling against. It’s arbitrary and backed up by no useful analysis. It is a stat for stat’s sake. WHIP is what’s ruining baseball.

and how dumb writers mock sabermetrics by saying all they care about is WHIP. Bizarre.

I also don’t get how it became such a fad in fantasy leagues. Why? What’s the point of it? The only thing that makes sense to me is trying to have a stat that you can draft around, but still includes sweet, sweet volatility. I don’t know why RA doesn’t provide that, but there you go.

The more you look at it, the more hilarious it gets. It’s not even a useful shorthand for anything. OK fine, it maps -sort of – to OBP. But….OBP doesn’t need to be shortened. It’s short! Just fucking use it! As cobbled-together and sort of messed up as OPS is, it works and DOES highlight two components of run scoring that mean more (esp. combined) than the ubiquitous batting average. WHIP obscures far more than it illuminates, and really needs to go away.

you’re pretty much preaching to the choir here

First off, i want to state that I think WHIP is a far inferior stat to many others out there today. I do not use it and never just look it up a player’s WHIP.

That said, it is not a horrible stat. Its good points:

1) Its easy to calculate. This is an overlooked variable when we are thinking about stats. I can tell any baseball fan older than 5 yrs old what WHIP stands for and they can figure out what a pitcher’s WHIP is. It also makes a lot of intuitive sense. A game is 9 innings long. The team that wins probably is the team that gave up less hits/walks.

2) Its more accurate than you probably think. I took the data from the teams last year. Team runs allowed and WHIP correlate with an R^2 of 0.89. That’s pretty good although probably not too surprising. WHIP and OBP are almost identical and OBP is a good predictor of runs scored. It is pretty well accepted that a combination of OBP and SLG gives a good predictor of runs scored.

For example GPA is a good predictor of runs scored. GPA = 0.25*(1.8*OBP + SLG) = 0.25*[2.8*BA+1.8*(ISOpa+ISOpo)]. Since WHIP accounts for BA and OBP (although not with the perfect weights), it can still be a good indicator of runs scored even though it ignores the effect of extra base hits.

3) Also, it is able to take into account strikeouts in a nonintuitive way. If a pitcher strikes out more batters there will be less batters who have a chance to get hits because he faces less batters per inning pitched. Although its not a great way to go about taking into account the value of a strike out, its in there whether you think about it or not.

When it comes down to it, WHIP isn’t a perfect stat. Its never hidden what it tries to do (the explanation of it is in the name). It doesn’t tell you who the best pitcher is. It doesn’t predict the future. It doesn’t tell you who scored the most runs. It doesn’t take into account extra base hits or the effect a defense has on a pitcher. It only tells you how many baserunners a pitcher allows per inning he pitches. Its extremely easy and wraps hits allowed and walks into an intuitive package. That’s the main reason why its used in fantasy baseball and every now and then quoted in the mainstream media. For fantasy owners, predicting WHIP requires a fair amount of skill because so many factors affect it and I think its a totally reasonable fantasy stat.

Should WHIP be entirely abandoned? I don’t think so. Its basically OBP for a pitcher and I think that WHIP is easier to calculate since its on an IP basis. I want to repeat that I think the simplicity of WHIP should not be overlooked. I know it doesn’t really do much that’s useful by itself but web pages are big and I think there is always a place somewhere on that page to put WHIP.