Playoff Rotations, 2003-2007

Anyone who's been a regular reader here knows how I've already looked at rotation spots throughout MLB in terms of FIP and ERA. The numbers for each league in 2007 and data for 2003-2007 using both statistics can be found here. The methodology is also explained there.

I've noticed some people disparaging the notion of a pitcher putting up league average numbers having much value. After all, the reasoning goes, league average includes all the bad teams whereas the average rotation to make the playoffs would be more telling (because no mediocre teams make the playoffs). Snark aside, there's a certain logic in that line of thinking. Making the playoffs with a below average rotation is possible (see: 2007 Phillies), but rare.

With that in mind, I decided to crunch the numbers and find out the rotation numbers of playoff teams over the past five seasons. Treating all four teams each year as one giant staff starting approximately 648 games, I then figured out the FIP and ERA for each rotation spot. Below are the results compared to the relevant league average for each season. The numbers (#1, #2, etc.) correspond to each spot in the rotation.

FIP: AL Playoff Teams vs. AL Average, 2003-2007

Year	Team	FIP	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	AL Playoff Teams	4.10	3.18	3.77	4.23	4.43	5.15
	AL Average	4.73	3.57	4.30	4.78	5.17	6.30
2004	AL Playoff Teams	4.38	3.42	3.93	4.34	4.95	5.55
	AL Average	4.80	3.75	4.40	4.77	5.19	6.11
2005	AL Playoff Teams	4.33	3.60	4.05	4.30	4.56	5.43
	AL Average	4.56	3.65	4.18	4.56	4.92	5.77
2006	AL Playoff Teams	4.49	3.31	4.19	4.47	4.81	6.03
	AL Average	4.66	3.55	4.18	4.63	5.08	6.31
2007	AL Playoff Teams	4.18	3.22	3.80	4.12	4.50	5.67
	AL Average	4.47	3.47	4.01	4.45	4.88	6.02
Last 5	AL Playoff Teams	4.29	3.31	3.96	4.28	4.61	5.63
	AL Average	4.64	3.60	4.21	4.64	5.05	6.13

Only in one spot in on year did the league out-perform the playoff teams. In 2006, the league average #2 starter had an FIP of 4.18 compared to the playoff teams' 4.19. Otherwise the playoff squads handily outpaced the rest of the league. The average playoff team's starter FIP was between 92.6% that of the league's. Note, however, that a league average starter (by FIP) still makes a good #4 pitcher for a playoff team based on the last five seasons.

ERA: AL Playoff Teams vs. AL Average, 2003-2007

Year	Team	ERA	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	AL Playoff Teams	4.15	2.66	3.66	4.30	4.61	6.04
	AL Average	4.66	3.18	4.05	4.56	5.37	6.97
2004	AL Playoff Teams	4.47	3.22	4.03	4.58	4.99	6.27
	AL Average	4.83	3.57	4.35	4.84	5.22	6.93
2005	AL Playoff Teams	4.15	3.21	3.59	4.00	4.52	6.17
	AL Average	4.52	3.21	3.85	4.40	5.07	6.73
2006	AL Playoff Teams	4.38	3.16	3.80	4.19	4.81	6.58
	AL Average	4.73	3.36	4.17	4.62	5.10	7.06
2007	AL Playoff Teams	4.29	3.07	3.70	4.26	4.73	6.27
	AL Average	4.61	3.29	3.88	4.42	5.23	7.00
Last 5	AL Playoff Teams	4.29	3.02	3.77	4.26	4.74	6.29
	AL Average	4.67	3.32	4.06	4.56	5.20	6.93

Again the playoff teams sink to league average in only one spot: #1 pitchers on playoff teams in 2005 were league average. Of course, when the rest of your rotation outpitches everyone else, you can afford that. The average playoff team ERA was 91.8% that of the league, or about the same as the difference in FIP. Not surprisingly, then, a league average pitcher slots in at #4 on a playoff team using ERA again.

So now that it turns out a league average starter is generally a good #4 starter on a playoff team in the American League, let's turn to the senior circuit. Pitching in the NL is considered to have a positive effect on a pitcher's statistics since opposing pitchers bat for themselves and the NL FIP has been below that of the AL in four of the past five seasons (2007 is the exception). Similarly, the NL ERA was higher than the AL ERA only in 2007. Perhaps, then, this skews the importance of league average starters to NL playoff teams.

FIP: NL Playoff Teams vs. NL Average, 2003-2007

Year	Team	FIP	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	NL Playoff Teams	4.13	3.08	3.82	4.14	4.55	5.42
	NL Average	4.55	3.42	4.13	4.52	4.95	6.15
2004	NL Playoff Teams	4.50	3.38	4.08	4.47	4.92	6.17
	NL Average	4.61	3.37	4.14	4.63	5.09	6.47
2005	NL Playoff Teams	4.20	3.11	3.68	4.36	4.72	5.48
	NL Average	4.45	3.35	4.05	4.43	4.95	5.85
2006	NL Playoff Teams	4.65	3.56	4.16	4.72	5.12	5.97
	NL Average	4.66	3.62	4.21	4.63	5.07	6.25
2007	NL Playoff Teams	4.66	3.64	4.34	4.70	5.01	5.90
	NL Average	4.60	3.48	4.17	4.66	5.04	6.04
Last 5	NL Playoff Teams	4.42	3.28	4.03	4.46	4.89	5.83
	NL Average	4.57	3.45	4.14	4.57	5.02	6.15

The past two seasons have been interesting in the National League. The general mediocrity of the starting staffs of the Cardinals and Mets in 2006 contributed the most to the #3 and #4 spots on playoff teams doing worse than league average (the Cardinals #3 starters had a 5.31 FIP!). Of course, each of those teams had better than average results from their fifth starters which no doubt helped them win enough games to get into the playoffs.

Last season is a different story. The Rockies (4.67) and Phillies (4.86) both had below average starting staffs overall. The Diamondbacks (4.58) and Cubs (4.54) were above average, but not by much. Cumulatively, this means the average playoff rotation was worse than league average overall. Only in the fourth and fifth starter spots did the playoff teams manage to outperform the league. There might be a moral in there (depth! depth! depth!). In any event, the National League in the past two seasons has shown that if you can run a half-decent staff out there and mash the ball, you've got a real shot.

The average NL playoff team rotation over the past five years put up an FIP that was 96.8% that of the league. Again, a league average starter slots in as a #4 overall, but in the past two seasons, playoff teams could use such a pitcher as a #3 guy. Maybe ERA will clear up the picture: perhaps these FIP-challenged teams were ERA-lucky.

ERA: NL Playoff Teams vs. NL Average, 2003-2007

Year	Team	ERA	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	NL Playoff Teams	3.90	2.75	3.45	3.90	4.24	5.66
	NL Average	4.40	2.97	3.81	4.24	4.92	7.04
2004	NL Playoff Teams	4.12	3.03	3.61	4.04	4.35	6.76
	NL Average	4.43	3.00	3.75	4.22	4.87	7.55
2005	NL Playoff Teams	3.79	2.42	3.09	3.78	4.45	5.66
	NL Average	4.23	2.81	3.70	4.23	4.70	6.23
2006	NL Playoff Teams	4.46	3.31	3.74	4.21	4.90	6.17
	NL Average	4.65	3.25	4.00	4.57	5.12	7.07
2007	NL Playoff Teams	4.47	3.43	4.00	4.30	4.78	6.51
	NL Average	4.64	3.29	3.97	4.50	5.12	7.03
Last 5	NL Playoff Teams	4.14	2.86	3.63	4.07	4.54	6.29
	NL Average	4.47	3.07	3.85	4.35	4.95	6.98

ERA makes recent playoff teams look a little better. Only the #1 and #2 (barely) starters last season were substandard, while only 2006 aces were below average. As long as most of your rotation outperforms their equivalents around the league, you can deal with a slightly below average top dog. The #1 pitchers in 2004 didn't get lucky in this table either, still finishing a little below the league average.

The playoff team ERA is 92.7% that of the league average over the past five seasons. That's close to the American League's numbers for FIP and ERA. League average starters are, yet again, good #4 starters on playoff teams.

I can see some people complaining that numbers like FIP and ERA don't get you into the playoffs: it's wins that count! With that in mind, I averaged the wins by each starting staff in each league in each season. In the American League, playoff teams could expect about 70 wins from their rotation each year. In the National League, that number drops to 65 wins. Either way, I think the moral of the story is it takes good defense combined with great offense to overcome a league average pitching staff and make the playoffs, but it's certainly possible.

Revisiting Rotation Spots

Earlier this offseason I had a few posts talking about the average ERA and FIP for each rotation spot in 2007. Now, one season isn't a whole lot of context in baseball: depending on what you're looking at, there can be a lot of fluctuation from year to year. That's why I thought it would be interesting to look at FIP and ERA by rotation spot over the past five seasons.

The methodology is the same as in the previous posts. A team's starts are broken up into quintiles, based on the FIP or ERA of their pitchers, and a weighted average is taken in each quintile based on the starts and FIP of each pitcher in it. For example, a team with a normal 162-game schedule would have their rotation spots looking like: #1 - 33 starts, #2 - 33 starts, #3 - 32 starts, #4 - 32 starts, #5 - 32 starts. If Pitcher A made 20 starts with a 3.30 ERA and Pitcher B made 15 starts with a 3.40 ERA and everyone else on the staff had higher numbers, Pitcher A's 20 starts would be combined with 13 of Pitcher B's starts to yield an average ERA of 3.34 in the top 33 starts. The remaining two starts from Pitcher B would be combined with Pitchers C, D, etc., to figure out the average ERA of the other rotation spots.

The numbers below in the tables are found by combining all the starts in the league for each season (~2490 for the NL and ~2268 for the AL), separating them into fifths, and using the process described above. The "Average" row is the average of the five numbers above. Also remember that rather than adjusting the constant added to the FIP number every season like The Hardball Times does, I just use 3.2 across the board.

NL Rotations by FIP, 2003-2007

Year	FIP	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	4.55	3.42	4.13	4.52	4.95	6.15
2004	4.61	3.37	4.14	4.63	5.09	6.47
2005	4.45	3.35	4.05	4.43	4.95	5.85
2006	4.66	3.62	4.21	4.63	5.07	6.25
2007	4.60	3.48	4.17	4.66	5.04	6.04
Average	4.57	3.45	4.14	4.57	5.02	6.15

NL Rotations by ERA, 2003-2007

Year	ERA	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	4.40	2.97	3.81	4.24	4.92	7.04
2004	4.43	3.00	3.75	4.22	4.87	7.55
2005	4.23	2.81	3.70	4.23	4.70	6.23
2006	4.65	3.25	4.00	4.57	5.12	7.07
2007	4.64	3.29	3.97	4.50	5.12	7.03
Average	4.47	3.07	3.85	4.35	4.95	6.98

Note: NL defenses must have taken some sort of hit in the past two seasons to have ERA's jump the way they did without FIP being similarly affected. 2005 is a kind of fluky season, but the FIP from before then are similar to 2006-2007 and yet ERAs are lower. Maybe it's an injury issue, as well.

AL Rotations by FIP, 2003-2007

Year	FIP	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	4.73	3.57	4.30	4.78	5.17	6.30
2004	4.80	3.75	4.40	4.77	5.19	6.27
2005	4.56	3.65	4.18	4.56	4.92	5.77
2006	4.66	3.55	4.18	4.63	5.08	6.31
2007	4.47	3.47	4.01	4.45	4.88	6.02
Average	4.64	3.60	4.21	4.64	5.05	6.13

AL Rotations by ERA, 2003-2007

Year	ERA	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
2003	4.66	3.18	4.05	4.56	5.37	6.97
2004	4.83	3.57	4.35	4.84	5.22	6.93
2005	4.52	3.21	3.85	4.40	5.07	6.73
2006	4.73	3.36	4.17	4.62	5.10	7.06
2007	4.61	3.29	3.88	4.42	5.23	7.00
Average	4.67	3.32	4.06	4.56	5.20	6.93

Now for the fun part: finding an average team rotation (using ERA) over the last five seasons. Players included must have started 60% of their games and had 500+ innings pitched in their league over the last five seasons.

First, the National League:

1. Average #1, 3.31 ERA: Carlos Zambrano (3.30 ERA)
2. Average #2, 3.91 ERA: Tom Glavine (3.97 ERA)
3. Average #3, 4.40 ERA: Chris Capuano (4.39 ERA)
4. Average #4, 4.96 ERA: Claudio Vargas (4.96 ERA)
5. Average #5, 6.68 ERA: Eric Milton (5.54 ERA) - he was the worst qualifier under my criteria. You'd have to go down to a 100 IP minimum to find guys who actually put up a 6.68 ERA in the NL, which tells you how often guys are shuffled in and out of the #5 spot due to injuries.

Second, the American League:

1. Average #1, 3.57 ERA: C.C. Sabathia (3.61 ERA)
2. Average #2, 4.19 ERA: Kenny Rogers (4.18 ERA)
3. Average #3, 4.61 ERA: Jose Contreras (4.57 ERA)
4. Average #4, 5.13 ERA: Joel Piniero (5.05 ERA)
5. Average #5, 6.66 ERA: Sidney Ponson (5.37 ERA) is the worst qualifier. You again have to go down to a minimum of 100 IP to find guys at 6.66 or worse.
   

AL Rotations by FIP for 2007

EDIT: Upon further review, I don't like the way I originally came about these numbers. For some reason, I had simply averaged each team's FIP in each spot for the league numbers. A smarter way to do it would be to treat the entire league as one giant rotation and determine the top 20% of starts (generally around 518 for the NL and 454 for the AL) for spot #1, etc. It makes no sense to penalize the league average rotation because the top 15 pitchers are clustered on, say, 8 teams. This tends to lower the value for #1 starters and raise the value for #5 starters while leaving the middle guys generally unchanged. I've changed the numbers in the tables to reflect the new method. The "average" rotations at the end are the same as before. Sorry for the mistake.

Back in October I wrote a post breaking down the average rotation and rotation spot in the National League by FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching (link goes to the definition at The Hardball Times). Since I never did a corresponding post for the American League, I figured I'd take care of that today.

By focusing only on outcomes for which a pitcher is solely responsible and taking defense out of the equation, FIP isn't influenced by the quality of a team's defense in the same way other pitching statistics, notably ERA, may be. As I said in the NL post, "FIP is not affected in the same way ERA would be for a pitcher if he had eight David Ortiz's on the field with him."

The FIP equation I use and methodology for determining the FIP for each rotation spot on a team is detailed in the other post but the quick explanation is it's a weighted average of each team's starts where the #1 spot is calculated by averaging the 33 best starts by FIP, #2 is the next 33, #3 is the next 32, and so on to total 162 games. For the Orioles, taking Erik Bedard's 28 starts with a 3.15 FIP and 5 Jeremy Guthrie starts with a 4.39 FIP gives you 3.34 as the FIP for the #1 spot in the Baltimore rotation.

In the table below, SFIP stands for the FIP put up by each team's starters based on the sum of the raw data. The #1-#5 columns are obviously the FIP for the corresponding spot in a team's rotation and the league values are the average of all teams. The final column, STDEV, is the standard deviation of each team's rotation which gives you a sense of how "even" it is. A high standard deviation coupled with a mediocre ace spells bad news.

2007 AL Rotations and Rotation Spots by FIP

Team	SFIP	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	STDEV
Los Angeles Angels	4.01	3.33	3.48	3.94	4.42	5.16	0.74
Cleveland Indians	4.15	3.10	3.78	4.16	4.60	5.45	0.88
Boston Red Sox	4.16	3.00	4.17	4.25	4.63	5.04	0.76
Oakland Athletics	4.24	3.46	3.65	4.35	4.75	5.53	0.84
Tampa Bay Devil Rays	4.34	3.41	3.82	4.40	4.85	5.65	0.88
Minnesota Twins	4.34	3.78	3.93	4.20	4.64	5.37	0.64
New York Yankees	4.40	3.75	3.82	4.01	4.36	6.93	1.34
Toronto Blue Jays	4.47	3.52	3.84	4.52	4.95	6.41	1.13
Chicago White Sox	4.47	3.69	4.22	4.35	4.87	5.50	0.69
Seattle Mariners	4.61	3.67	4.28	4.67	4.95	5.89	0.82
Baltimore Orioles	4.71	3.34	4.54	4.92	5.21	6.22	1.05
Detroit Tigers	4.78	3.89	4.17	4.64	5.22	6.41	1.00
Kansas City Royals	4.80	3.92	4.29	4.61	5.05	6.88	1.16
Texas Rangers	5.21	4.51	4.63	4.95	5.55	6.60	0.86
AL	4.47	3.47	4.01	4.45	4.88	6.02	0.97

The AL as a league did better than the NL in terms of starter FIP, winning 4.47 to 4.61, despite an extra hitter in the lineup to draw walks and hit home runs. The Rangers join the Marlins and Nationals as the only teams with a SFIP over 5.00, though Washington did have a higher number than Texas. The only rotation spot in which the NL bettered the AL was #5, by a 0.10 margin. I guess the senior league can take solace in the fact they have "better" bad pitching.

I want to put these numbers into context like I did for the National League by finding pitchers that performed close to each rotation spot's average.

AL #1 Starters (3.60 FIP or below) , 20+ Starts

• Josh Beckett, 30 starts, 3.04 FIP
• C.C. Sabathia, 34, 3.10
• Erik Bedard, 28, 3.15
• Kelvim Escobar, 30, 3.35
• Scott Kazmir, 34, 3.41
• Joe Blanton, 34, 3.46
• John Lackey, 33, 3.50
• Roy Halladay, 31, 3.51
• Dan Haren is the closest to the average with a 3.66 FIP in 34 starts.
  

AL #2 Starters (~4.04 FIP), 20+ Starts

• Justin Verlander, 32 starts, 3.95 FIP
  
• Gil Meche, 34, 3.98
  
• Mike Mussina, 27, 4.00
• Jered Weaver, 28, 4.02
• Jeremy Bonderman, 4.15

AL #3 Starters, (~4.43 FIP), 20+ Starts

• Brian Bannister, 27 starts, 4.36 FIP
• Jeremy Guthrie, 26, 4.39
• Miguel Batista, 32, 4.50
• Kevin Millwood, 31, 4.51
• Nate Robertson, 30, 4.58

AL #4 Starters (~4.86 FIP), 20+ Starts

• Brandon McCarthy, 22 starts, 4.75 FIP
• Boof Bonser, 30, 4.75
• Odalis Perez, 26, 4.77
• Jose Contreras, 30, 4.78
• Edwin Jackson, 31, 4.84
• Shaun Marcum, 25, 4.90
• Daniel Cabrera, 34, 4.97
• Jeff Weaver, 27, 5.03

AL #5 Starters (~5.93 FIP), 10+ Starts

• Chad Durbin, 19 starts, 5.76 FIP
• Kyle Davies, 11, 5.94
• Tomokazu Ohka, 10, 5.95
• Jae Seo, 10, 5.96
• Casey Fossum, 10, 6.10
• Robinson Tejeda, 19, 6.15
• Mike Maroth, 13, 6.35
• Kei Igawa, 12, 6.66
  

Mike Mussina is kind of like the AL's version of Chris Capuano, a starter who appeared to drastically underperform his FIP. Other than that, I can't say there's many surprises on these lists, though it is kind of sad that the Rangers' best starter was only an average #3 pitcher.

Jae Seo and Casey Fossum appearing at the bottom of the list reminds me of a curious trivia item: The Tampa Bay Devil Rays were the only major league team to have every pitcher that started a game for them end with at least ten starts for them. Scott Kazmir (34), James Shields (31), Edwin Jackson (31), Andy Sonnenstine (22), Jason Hammel (14), J.P. Howell (10), Jae Seo (10), and Casey Fossum (10) combined for the team's 162 starts.

I'll end the post by recapping the league average rotation by FIP:

1. Dan Haren (3.66 FIP)
2. Jered Weaver (4.02 FIP)
3. Jeremy Guthrie (4.39 FIP)
4. Edwin Jackson (4.84 FIP)
5. Kyle Davis (5.94 FIP)

Tomorrow look for the same sort of post using ERA in place of FIP just for fun.

NL Rotations by FIP for 2007

EDIT: Upon further review, I don't like the way I originally came about these numbers. For some reason, I had simply averaged each team's FIP in each spot for the league numbers. A smarter way to do it would be to treat the entire league as one giant rotation and determine the top 20% of starts (generally around 518 for the NL and 454 for the AL) for spot #1, etc. It makes no sense to penalize the league average rotation because the top 15 pitchers are clustered on, say, 8 teams. This tends to lower the value for #1 starters and raise the value for #5 starters while leaving the middle guys generally unchanged. I've changed the numbers in the tables to reflect the new method. The "average" rotations at the end are the same as before. Sorry for the mistake.

There are a number of different things to get out of the way before the meat and potatoes of this post. Most importantly, the idea for this fun little exercise came from the article "How Good Is Your #4 Starter?" by Jeff Sackmann and the follow-up "More Fun With Rotation Numbers." He used ERA to calculate his numbers and I will have another post soon utilizing ERA. For this post, however, I am using FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching. FIP attempts to measure a pitcher's worth through the outcomes for which he is directly responsible during a game: home runs, hit batsmen, bases on balls, and strikeouts. In this way, defense largely is taken out of the equation. Thus, FIP is not affected in the same way ERA would be for a pitcher if he had eight David Ortiz's on the field with him.

The formula I use is (HR*13+(BB+HBP)*3-K*2)/IP + 3.2 = FIP. In actuality, the constant should be slightly larger than 3.2, depending on the league, but since I don't know exactly how much larger, I used 3.2 for simplicity's sake. Since it affects everyone in the NL, no one is given an unfair advantage.

In order to determine the numbers for each team's rotation spots, I figured the ideal rotation would give a team 33 starts by their #1 and #2 pitchers and 32 starts by the other three (San Diego and Colorado both had an extra start by their #3 starter for my calculation). Using this idea, I took the weighted average of the team's top 33 starts by FIP to determine the FIP for rotation spot #1, and so on for the other four spots.

Example, to determine the #1 spot for the Brewers, I would see that Yovani Gallardo had 17 starts with a 3.49 FIP, Manny Parra had 2 starts with 3.87 FIP and Ben Sheets had 24 starts with a 4.07 FIP. Sheets' starts are split between the #1 and #2 spot and you get

• #1 FIP = (17*3.49+2*3.87+14*4.07)/33 = 3.76

Therefore the Brewers got a 3.76 FIP from their "#1 spot."

The SFIP column stands for "Starter FIP" for each team, i.e., the FIP put up only by starting pitchers in games they started. The NL averages were computed by simply taking the average of each team's FIP in each spot. The NL FIP was computed by applying the FIP formula to the raw numbers of HR, HBP, BB, K and IP throughout the league. The STDEV column is the standard deviation of the team's five rotation spots. The smaller the number, the closer together the five spots are and the more "even" a team's rotation is. This is fallible, in the sense that a team with a great ace will appear to have an uneven rotation even if the #4 and #5 starters really aren't that bad.

Finally, as Jeff said in his follow-up article:

These calculations don't hold the key for any breakthrough new approach to roster construction, but they do illustrate some of the ways in which good (or lucky) teams are different from bad ones.

Now that the explanation is out of the way, on to the table!

Team	SFIP	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	STDEV
San Diego Padres	3.82	2.80	3.38	3.54	4.37	5.67	1.11
Los Angeles Dodgers	4.22	3.59	3.90	4.02	4.37	5.55	0.76
San Francisco Giants	4.28	3.55	3.77	4.43	4.81	5.03	0.64
Milwaukee Brewers	4.36	3.76	4.13	4.37	4.51	5.08	0.49
Chicago Cubs	4.54	4.06	4.26	4.52	4.69	5.32	0.48
Pittsburgh Pirates	4.54	3.91	4.18	4.52	4.76	5.78	0.72
Cincinnati Reds	4.54	3.67	4.45	4.53	4.55	6.29	0.96
Arizona Diamondbacks	4.58	3.19	4.16	4.74	5.34	6.02	1.09
Atlanta Braves	4.59	3.18	3.42	5.17	5.40	6.70	1.47
New York Mets	4.59	3.80	4.29	4.72	4.82	5.54	0.65
Colorado Rockies	4.67	3.96	4.32	4.64	5.07	5.54	0.62
Houston Astros	4.79	3.57	4.21	5.34	5.47	5.61	0.90
Philadelphia Phillies	4.86	3.76	4.58	4.98	5.20	6.11	0.86
St.Louis Cardinals	4.91	3.70	4.76	4.88	5.13	6.42	0.97
Florida Marlins	5.12	4.07	5.05	5.19	5.33	6.17	0.75
Washington Nationals	5.41	4.45	5.15	5.52	5.78	6.43	0.74
NL	4.60	3.48	4.17	4.66	5.04	6.04	0.96

I guess the old adage "pitching wins championships" didn't hold especially true in the NL this year as Chicago and Arizona were the only teams to be much above league average in FIP from their starters and they were still very close to the mean. Another thing I noticed that kind of surprised me was how mediocre Florida's starters were. Granted a team losing 90 games generally won't have very good starters in the first place, but I was shocked to find out they only got 37 starts all season from a pitcher winding up with an ERA below 5.00 as a starter (27 from Sergio Mitre, 6 from Anibal Sanchez and 4 from Ricky Nolasco). Furthermore, they only got 42 starts from a pitcher with an FIP under 5.00. That's perversely impressive.

Regardless, simply seeing the numbers might not strike your fancy. Let's look at which starters came closest to each rotation spot's average, in order to give some context.

First, here are the starters that were "aces" (3.69 or lower FIP) in 20 or more starts:

• Jake Peavy, 34 starts, 2.80 FIP
  
• John Smoltz, 32, 3.17
• Brandon Webb, 34, 3.20
• Chris Young, 30, 3.39
• Tim Hudson, 34, 3.42
• Greg Maddux, 34, 3.54
• Roy Oswalt, 32, 3.55
• Brad Penny, 33, 3.59
• Tim Lincecum, 24, 3.59
• Aaron Harang, 34, 3.67

No real surprises, though it must be unsettling for batters in the NL West to see that rookie Tim Lincecum shows up as an ace already (note: Yovani Gallardo made 17 starts with a 3.49 FIP, so he was good as well).

Let's see who fits the mold as a #2 starter (~4.25 FIP):

• Chris Capuano, 25 starts, 4.16 FIP
• Tom Gorzelanny, 32, 4.20
• Rich Hill, 32, 4.28
• Oliver Perez, 28, 4.30

It's tough for a Brewers fan to see that Capuano was actually better than an average #2 starter by FIP, but there it is. His struggles could very possibly be a combination of bad luck and poor defense behind him inflating his numbers. Regardless, the other names on the list are not very surprising as all three pitchers had good seasons.

Our #3 starters (~4.69 FIP):

• Paul Maholm, 29 starts, 4.56 FIP (everyone between Maholm and Davis had less than 20 starts)
  
• Doug Davis, 33, 4.68 FIP
• Micah Owings, 27, 4.78
• Braden Looper, 30, 4.79

Doug Davis nailed the middle-of-the-rotation niche and it makes sense. He eats innings and nibbles too much on the corners to be good, but he gets the job done most nights.

Alright, we're headed to the back half of the rotation. The #4 starters (~4.98 FIP):

• Jason Marquis, 33 starts, 4.94 FIP
  
• Jamie Moyer, 32, 5.00
• Anthony Reyes, 20, 5.02
• Dontrelle Willis, 35, 5.09

Jason Marquis has always been kind of middling. Moyer gave you about what you could expect from a 44-year-old soft-tosser. Reyes is young and struggling, while Willis continued sliding further from the dominance he showed in 2005. Is he sick of playing in Florida or is his delivery no longer fooling hitters the way it did?

Finally, we've reached the land of the damned--er, I mean the #5 starters (~5.83 FIP):

• Livan Hernandez, 33 starts, 5.73 FIP
• Byung-Hyun Kim, 22, 5.76
• Adam Eaton, 30, 5.93
• Mike Bacsik, 20, 6.38

Unsurprisingly, not many pitchers this bad made more than 20 starts. Other than Bacsik, only Joel Hanrahan (11) and Jo-Jo Reyes (10) reached double-digits for starts with an FIP over 6.00. Tim Stauffer had the worst FIP, putting up a 12.85 in 7 2/3 IP in his two starts for the Padres. Five HR, 6 BB, 6 K and an HBP will do that to a pitcher. Wilfredo Ledezma and J.A. Happ also scored above 10.

To recap, the National League average rotation would look like this:

• Aaron Harang
• Rich Hill
• Doug Davis
• Jamie Moyer
• Byung-Hyun Kim/Adam Eaton

The Mets' rotation was pretty close to league average across the board, as well.

I'll be putting up a similar post using ERA soon. I think this sort of number-crunching is interesting, if not especially useful.