Introducing Pitching Efficiency, a new metric to evaluate pitchers performance in baseball
Published in lch99310.github.io, 2022
The original idea was inspired by Moneyball, the film in 2011. In the film, Paul DePodesta (a baseball analyst) told Billy Beane (a general manager) that the most important metric in baseball was outs. Every baseball team only has 27 outs in a game. Who scores higher before 27 outs win. That’s why after the conversation, Oakland Athletics (the Moneyball team) valued on-base percentage (OBP) the most because OBP is a metric to evaluate how good a hitter can get on base before the outs. As more and more advanced metrics to evaluate hitters’ performance, however, metrics evaluating pitchers’ performance so far is more focusing on the run instead of out. ERA and FIP, two iconic metrics used in baseball analytics, are all related to run. To my knowledge, there are no metrics to evaluate pitchers’ performance based on out. Here, I introduce Pitching Efficiency (PE), a new metric to evaluate pitcher performance.