I’ve looked into producing FIP for our pitchers several times over the last several years, but I run into the same problem with it that I run into with so many of the other metrics used for MLB players. The constants won’t work because there’s no way to get them. L Remember, this is HSBB.
Even though the article tells how to compute the constant, and it is pretty simple, when these guys talk about the league ERA, they’re talking about AL or NL. In our section of Ca, we have 195 schools and 27 leagues, playing in 7 different divisions. We play about half our games outside of our league, at least 3 or 4 outside of our section, and at least 3 or 4 outside of our division. Then to make things even more difficult, not all teams post all stats from all games, so that constant is really a PITA to come up with.
So here’s what our team’s pitchers look like. The 1st page is all the pitchers and the 2nd is the pitchers who’ve thrown at least 25% of the highest number of innings pitched since 2007. I threw 3 in as a constant for no particular reason, but for me, not having the constant is just fine if I’m comparing only our pitchers and ordering the results by the FIP # without the constant.
I do think numbers like this one and others could certainly be useful to scouts looking at HS or college players. Not that they’d make it possible to pinpoint a pitcher who would make it at the next level, but they could certainly be used as another “filter” to help them get through the hundreds of thousands of players in the mix.