Thursday, May 10, 2012

Understand Sabermetrics : Walks + Hits / Innings Pitched (WHIP)

We have done the first three stats mainly geared towards hitters, let us let the pitchers get their time to shine shall we? A great way to look at how well a pitcher is doing is to look at his walks + hits by innings pitched, or more commonly known as WHIP. It is basically the pitchers statmeticians answer to moneyball and OBP. Basically what WHIP studies is the number of base runners a pitcher allows per inning pitched. Moneyball guys want players who get on base and pitchers WHIP, invented in 1979 by Daniel Okrent, shows a pitchers ability to keep those moneyball guys off the bases. 


The lowest single season WHIP in baseball history was posted by Red Sox starter , and son of the Yankees, Pedro Martinez with a 0.7373 WHIP in 2000. Addie Joss has the current record for career lowest WHIP with a 0.9678 WHIP in nearly 3000 IP with the Cleveland Indians. Currently Mariano Rivera is ranked third in WHIP for his career. 




Let us use a Yankee to put this more in perspective so let us use Mariano Rivera.  Mariano , in 2011, had a staggering 8 walks and 47 hits allowed in his 61.1 IP. That makes Mariano's WHIP set at 0.90 which is amazing. 



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Sorry for the Capatcha... Blame the Russians :)