So yesterday I reported on what I calculated Roy Oswalt's DIPS ERA would be. I told you that it was 4.85 and that margin of error was +/- .198 ERA points (whoops). I also urged you to check my math. Being totally afraid of one of you guys telling me what I did wrong, I spent my morning haggling over the data set I thought I needed to fix the math and when that failed (they wanted $1000!!!), purchasing three used books on Amazon, and then finally sucking it up and really trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Now, most of you might ask yourself, "why is he so sure that he screwed up?" First of all, I know myself very well. I'm incapable of not making stupid mistakes, like negative signs or decimal placements, etc. Secondly, the numbers just didn't feel right. That combination really caused me to lose sleep.
Thankfully, I can report to you today, that I figured out what I was doing wrong. It was a decimal place. I wasn't subtracting out the full amount of HR's from the B variable of Base Runs. The results are a lot more inline with what you might expect from Roy Oswalt this year. He's sporting a 4.29 DIPS ERA. Which is just at his ERA for this season and slightly above his FIP of 4.10 and half a run up on his expected FIP of 3.72. This still seems to indicate that the Roy struggled in the early going, but I feel that this new, drastically lower DIPS is the result of Roy Oswalt's return to form post injury. I'll be able to keep you posted, start by start, from here on out about how his DIPS ERA moves, hopefully we'll see the downward trend in the DIPS ERA and thus allowing us to fully write of his aberrant first half as the result of poor mechanics stemming from a funky hip.
While Roy's new numbers are good news for Astros fans, I'll give you a sneak peek at another Astros pitcher's DIPS ERA (I'll roll out the full rotation next week). Brian Moehler, he of the miraculous and feel good season, is sporting a DIPS ERA of 5.18. This probably isn't all that unexpected for those of you who have looked at his FIP or xFIP, but this is an bit of jump on those numbers. I'll save the full line of analysis for when I put the full info up, but it looks like Brian Moehler has been extremely lucky to have the Astros defense backing him and is probably due for a heaping dose of regression.
Here's the updated spread sheet that includes the Moehler data ( royandbriandips ) it's still in Excel format, but, again, if you want it in CSV, just let me know.