This is a bit of cross-post from my site, but I know a large portion of people don't read it and I wanted to share this with McC anyways. If this is bad form, mods feel free to nuke this thread and/or make it a LOLCAT image depository.

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I plotted every pitcher with 30 IP by ERA vs tRA. tRA is a little like FIP but I think it's more nuanced. FIP only takes into account 4 things that can happen when a pitcher throws the ball -- HR, BB, K, HBP -- and attempts to show you how well a pitcher pitched regardless of the defense behind him. When you think about it, ERA is more of a team run prevention metric than a pitching metric because after ball is hit into play, the pitcher has nothing to do with the results. Anyways, tRA is like FIP but I said it's more nuanced, in that I mean that it accounts for way more factors -- such as assorted BIP types -- than the 4 that FIP looks it.

You can find a really easy to read primer on tRA here. But, the bottom line is that tRA (and FIP) attempt to show you how well a pitcher pitched regardless of the quality of defense and park they played in. tRA and FIP attempt to examine the things a picture can control and then figure out his value from there.

So, I plotted every Giants pitcher with 30 IP. I looked at their RA/9 vs tRA to see if I could find out who was underperforming and overperforming their stats.

Underpeformers = players had an RA/9 higher than their tRA, indicating that they had some bad fortune.

Overpeformers = players who had an RA/9 lower than their tRA, indicating that they had good fortune.

Here's the plot:

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Update: I've changed the plot over from ERA to RA/9 because it works better with tRA. RA/9 is how many runs a pitcher allowed over nine innings. This includes unearned runs as well.

I'll re-add some bullet points from the plot later.

Thanks for the help, everyone!