What is WHIP in Baseball? And is it a Valuable Stat?
WHIP in baseball is often the first stat mentioned after a pitcher’s ERA. It is one of the most heavily used statistics in baseball to evaluate how well a pitcher has done.
But what is WHIP in baseball? Is WHIP actually valuable in evaluating pitcher quality? I mean, does WHIP help us predict a pitcher’s future performance? And finally, how does this stat compare to other stats used to evaluate pitchers.
Understanding different sports stats always goes beyond looking at the basic definition. The basic definition is important, but more important is understanding why the stat is defined that way. Everything else about a stat flows from this deeper understanding: when to apply it, its shortcomings, and how it compares to other similar stats.
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What Does WHIP Mean in Baseball?
WHIP is a stat used to evaluate how good a pitcher is in baseball. It stands for Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched. Walks and hits are the most common ways for a team to get baserunners. With that in mind, this stat essentially (though, not exactly, can you tell why?) measures the number of baserunners a pitcher allows per inning.
To compute it, we add up the hits and walks – including intentional walks – a pitcher has given up. Then, we compute the total innings the pitcher has pitched. Finally, WHIP is computed by dividing the total hits and walks by the number of innings pitched. Symbolically, WHIP = \frac{1B+2B+3B+HR+BB+IBB}{IP}.
Before moving on, we include a note on innings pitched. Oftentimes relief pitchers pitch for only a portion of an inning. If a pitcher accounts for one out, their box score will read 0.1 IP. However, it is important to remember that this is just notation and is not meant to indicate that the pitcher actually threw for one tenth of an inning. In baseball mathematics, we have to remember that 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 =1 .
Weird things can happen if a pitcher has an especially short outing. If a pitcher is having a bad day and doesn’t record any outs, then it is possible for their WHIP to be infinite because the innings pitched is zero. However, for this and other reasons, WHIP is a better stat to use over the course of many games rather than to summarize a pitcher’s performance in a single game.
What Does WHIP Tell Us?
WHIP counts the number of negative outcomes for a pitcher in an inning. A walk or a hit is essentially a successful outcome for the batter. The simple rationale behind this stat is that the less often you allow batter’s to have successful outcomes, the better you are as a pitcher. This means that a small WHIP means that a pitcher is pretty good.
On the other hand, allowing lots and lots of walks and hits means that a pitcher is not successful at a job. A high amount of walks and hits per inning pitched is indicative of a poor pitcher.
A Note on Simple and Interpretable Stats
Before moving on to discuss what I think are some fairly significant negative aspects of WHIP, I want to mention one positive that is extremely important for budding data scientists and statisticians to remember: interpretability and simplicity.
The point of advanced metrics is to convey as much information both as accurately as possible and as clearly as possible. Oftentimes, when defining more and more complex metrics, we sacrifice interpretability and simplicity in order to increase accuracy. For more general audiences, sometimes the simpler stats that get us “most of the way there” are the best to use.
So, though I think there are better stats to use when evaluating the quality of a pitcher, WHIP is still pretty good. For general audiences, it will be much more understandable than something like RE24 or WAR and therefore will convey more information. Equally important, when teaching baseball to younger players, something like WHIP will give a player a notable metric to focus on to gauge their own performance and improvement in real time. I like the following video (the guy has lots of good content) to help explain what I mean.
What is a Good WHIP in Baseball?
League wide, over the last few years the average WHIP is about 1.3. This means that an average pitcher against an average team will allow 1.3 walks or hits per inning. But the very best of the best allow much fewer walks and hits.
In the 2022 season, Justin Verlander led the league in WHIP, allowing only about 0.8 walks and hits per inning. There were 9 other pitchers in the 0.9-1.0 range. Anything under 1.0 is elite while anything under 1.15 is also very good.
The table below shows the #1 and #10 WHIP rankings over the last few years. The point of this table is to help understand what is a good WHIP in baseball by looking at how the stats trend over the course of a few years.
Season | #1 | #10 |
|---|---|---|
2022 | Verlander (0.83) | Manoah (0.99) |
2021 | Scherzer (0.86) | Wainwright (1.06) |
2020 | Maeda (0.75) | Hendricks (1.00) |
2010 | Cliff Lee (1.00) | Josh Johnson (1.10) |
2000 | Pedro Martinez (0.74) | Jon Lieber (1.20) |
Is WHIP a Good Stat?
The central question now is whether or not WHIP is a good statistic. To determine how good a stat is, we need to consider what its goal was and how well it accomplished this goal. The point of WHIP is explicitly to describe how good a pitcher is and to be able to compare two pithers.
My opinion on the matter is that WHIP is a good first attempt at describing pitcher quality but can fall quite short of its goal. The main reason that WHIP is insufficient as a stat is that it does not properly penalize pitcher’s for the types of hits they allow.
Certain pitchers allow more home runs than others. Some, on the other hand, specialize in keeping all batted balls on the ground which limits the potential damage. However, in the eyes of WHIP, these two actions are identically punished.
Moreover, WHIP is inconsistent in what it counts. For example, intentional walks, though not indicative of a pitcher’s lack of control, are counted against them in this stat. Similarly, if the point of WHIP is to count the average number of baserunners per inning, then certainly batters hit by pitch should be included in the stat too.
The final knock I see against using WHIP as a metric to rate pitchers is that allowing baserunners isn’t the only action that determines how good a pitcher is. Some others include:
- Certain baserunners are more detrimental than others (for example, doubles are worse than singles).
- Some pitchers draw more double plays via creating more ground balls than fly balls. This makes baserunners less of a problem.
- Some pitchers have good pick off moves and don’t allow hardly any stolen bases. Some give up lots of stolen bases so that allowing baserunners is worse.
These things, in addition to others, all go into how good a pitcher is.
The key thing to remember is that specifying the goal of a metric is important. WHIP measures the number of baserunners per inning. But the team that gets the most baserunners isn’t always the team that wins. The team that scores the most runs is the team that wins. Therefore, the best way to measure pitcher quality is to use a metric that directly measures how many runs they allow.
And no, I don’t mean ERA.
Alternatives to WHIP
To me, the greatest strength of WHIP is that it is a good “first look” at how good a pitcher is while being extremely easy to interpret. But ERA does the same thing and, as we discussed in the last section, measures runs more directly. Therefore, for a simple to use and easy to understand metric, I think ERA is the better way to go.
However, if we want to use advanced stats and metrics to better capture pitcher quality, I think there is an alternative to WHIP in baseball that does much better. My stat of choice when it comes to nearly anything baseball is RE24.
RE24 is a stat which computes how much value (in units of runs) a player adds to his team’s total or subtracts from the other team’s total. For example, a strikeout decreases the expected number of runs the other team will score. A lead off double increases the expected number of runs our team will score. RE24 figures out how many runs a player is responsible for contributing.
In this way, RE24 solves many of the problems that WHIP has. WHIP suffers because it doesn’t differentiate between types of hits. RE24 punishes somebody more for allowing big hits than for singles. Moreover, RE24 is great because it is easily interpretable: it tells us how many runs a player is worth.
In the last section, we said that the best stats for pitchers should directly measure how many runs they accounted for. RE24 does this, WHIP does not. So, while WHIP is a good stat, especially for beginners and casual fans, we can do much better when evaluating pitcher quality.
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