Your link was wrong, as it only dates back to 2010, not 2000. But it wasn't hard to adjust the dates.
Regardless, I did not mean pitchers who are simply good at getting ground balls. Obviously I am not considering Jimmy Anderson a good pitcher just because he induces a lot of ground ball outs.
Rather, I was referring to good pitchers who are/were considered ground ball pitchers.
Pitchers such as:
Brandon Webb
Matt Cain
Jair Jurrjens
Mark Buehrle
Chris Carpenter
Doug Fister
I will give you Derek Lowe. He was definitely a very good ground ball pitcher who did not outpitch his FIP consistently.
Also I wouldn't say I was necessarily comparing Hudson and Miller. Just pointing out the fallacy of saying you must maintain X amount of FIP in order to be a TOR pitcher.
Hm... yeah, I messed up the chart, but the point stands. Here is the corrected chart, with performance data: (
link) You can still clearly see there is no strong correlation even if you exclude the terrible Jimmy Andersons.
As for your list, it makes no sense (league average GB% = ~44%):
Brandon Webb - Yep, extreme GB% (64.2%)
Main Cain - Not a GB pitcher (37.7 %); extreme
flyball guy
Jair Jurrjens - Not a GB pitcher (43.6 %); almost exactly league average GB%
Mark Buehrle - Not a GB pitcher (45.4 %); almost exactly league average GB%
Chris Carpenter - A GB% pitcher (51.2 %, and higher at his peak), but his career FIP and ERA were almost exactly the same (3.76 vs 3.80, though again, a bigger difference at his peak)
Doug Fister - A very slight GB% (49.2 %) who has had a higher ERA than FIP in 2 of the last 3 years, though for his short career there is some difference (3.34 vs. 3.53)
So basically all you have there to support your argument is Webb and maybe Carpenter and Fister. To which I can counter Lowe, Roy Halladay, Mark Mulder, Kevin Brown, Felix Hernandez, Rick Porcello, AJ Burnett, Jake Westbrook, Aaron Cook, Justin Masterson, Mike Hampton, Brett Anderson, Lucas Harrell, Paul Maholm, CM Wang... All these pitchers have a GB% >50, have seen some or a lot of success, and have no FIP-ERA difference (or some have their ERAs much higher than their FIPs).
Actually,
the exact opposite of what you are claiming is true. GB pitchers do not rely on low BABIP because GBs are more likely to be hits than FBs. It is actually extreme
flyball pitchers that tend to beat their FIP since a larger amount of FBs are caught, thus lowering their BABIP. Take a look at this (
link) where you will see guys like:
Matt Cain
Johan Santana
Jered Weaver
Julio Teheran
Jarrod Washburn
Chris Young (the most extreme example)
Ted Lilly
El Duque
Kevin Appier
Barry Zito
All were pretty good and had high flyball rates >40% (league average = ~36%) with notable ERA-FIP deltas. Now, not certainly every flyball pitcher does this, but the long and the short of it is that they are more likely to buck the FIP regression than the GB guys.
To bring it back this actually bodes well for Miller, since he is himself a moderate flyball guy (41%). So it wouldn't be shocking for him to beat his FIP by a little bit (but not by anything close to a .50 - 1.00 difference).
