Javier Assad and the Mighty FIP Beaters

While browsing through some stats the other day, I came across something I found interesting. Allow me to rattle off six teams, and I’ll let you decide what they all have in common: Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, Cleveland Guardians, New York Yankees, and Seattle Mariners. 

You maybe haven’t thought of the one specific thing that they have in common, but I’d bet you thought something about how all of those teams have typically had pretty good pitching staffs lately—and you’d be correct. While those aren’t necessarily the six best pitching staffs in MLB, you have five teams who have routinely shown they can cobble a bullpen together, plus the Mariners, who have a tree of young starting pitchers that they somehow continue to pluck and eat richly from. 

Those are also the six teams that have most outperformed their FIP from the 2021 season through the 2024 season, according to FanGraphs. I bring this up because right after the Mariners on that list are the Chicago Cubs:

There are a few other things to note when reviewing the full chart above. One is that, while the Cubs do make this top 10, there is a significant drop off following the first team, the third team, and then the fifth team. The Cubs come in seventh, but the Dodgers have still outperformed their FIP by more than double what the Cubs have done.

Second is that the Cubs have the highest ERA and FIP of this group, by quite a bit. They have the lowest strikeout rate, too, which surely hasn’t helped. This relates to the third thing, which is that all of these teams have made the playoffs (in most cases, more than once) in our timeframe—except for the Cubs.

Defense is likely partly the cause for this, but not all of it. FIP assumes batted balls turn into outs at an average rate. A good defense will turn them into outs at an above-average rate, naturally. The Mariners have not necessarily rated as a particularly good defensive team during the period of this study, though. The Texas Rangers have been rated as one of the best defensive teams and have actually underperformed their FIP. While good defense can help, I don’t think it’s our only variable here.

The other thought that popped into my head was whether or not this was just the Javier Assad effect. Here’s a list of the eight Cubs pitchers who have surpassed 200 total innings in the last four seasons, and you’ll notice that though Assad is doing lots of heavy lifting, he’s certainly not the only suspect:

I subscribe to the belief that data should mostly tell you what you already think it will. If I look at a random hitting metric and it tells me that Ian Happ, a good hitter but certainly not best in baseball territory, is number one, I’ll know it might not correlate perfectly with overall offensive production. If it tells me that Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Juan Soto are the best at a certain thing, then I’ll know it’s probably pretty important to being a good hitter.

When the Dodgers, Brewers, and Astros flow to the top of a list, this tells me that there might be something to being able to consistently outperform your FIP as a team. This is mostly a list of teams that maximize the pitchers they have in-house. This isn’t to say that there can’t be surprises. The Cubs would qualify as a surprise here, at least to me. I am not nearly qualified enough to dig super deep into the data and figure out why, specifically, each of these teams is listed here, though I may try at a later date with more time. 

All of that said, given the teams that the Cubs are listed with here, I believe it shows that they are doing something right with their pitching development. It frustrates me that they haven’t turned it into more team success, like every other team listed there has. It frustrates me that they can’t marry the ability to turn batted balls into outs with the ability to run a high strikeout rate. That would certainly lower that team ERA into the same range as the rest of the group.

It also encourages me. These four seasons encompass the Jed Hoyer era, and they come just a couple of years after the pitch lab officially opened, marking an increased emphasis on internal development. Or, maybe they have just been getting very lucky. Either way, this will be something to watch during the 2025 season.