[Syd Thrift]

I think there's a big difference between calling something straight-out luck and calling it, I don't know, second or third degree luck. Jarrod Washburn was insanely lucky last year with the M's in that he gave up an awful lot of warning track fly balls but not a lot of HRs with the team. He was second order lucky in that he played half his games in a ballpark particularly suited to him in Safeco Field and a fast, rangey outfield. Are the last two things really "luck" in the sense that we mean it? Not really. A pitcher who plays to the people behind him is exhibiting a skill. Even though that team could change fielders or he could get traded, that has to count for *something*... and I am not sure that a single metric like FIP really works so well for that.

That being said, something not feeling right is not in and of itself a good enough a good enough reason to scrap it. Tom Tango may be right that about half of luck rights itself for pitchers in about 2-3 seasons of starts, but if you look at the numbers themselves there is not a great deal of spread. There *is* a great deal of spread in a single season's worth of BABIP totals, but once you get to 2-3000 PAs you see a lot of guys with BABIPs around .290 and a few select folks - Mariano Rivera, knuckleball pitchers - with some lower totals (and extreme groundballers IIRC have slightly higher numbers but more than make up for it by and large with lower extra-base hit and HR numbers). Tango's findings aren't invalidating what Voros McCracken came up with in the late 90s, they enhance it.