For those not following the sabermetric updates Baseball Prospectus has attempted to create a new pitching statistic that improves on all those before it.
This new stat is called SIERA or Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average. This takes the work of Nate Silver who created QERA to attempt to fix the combined issues in FIP and xFIP. So far the sabermetric community has put in lots of work reviewing, but what are the early returns?
Matt Schwartz and Eric Seidman are the main authors on this work and attempt to describe first why this new stat is needed. The biggest reason is that while FIP, xFIP and QERA are all very instructional they do have a problem. That problem lays in a potential weighting of the three factors pitchers control strike outs, walks and groundball rate. In this case QERA is the worst for that failing as stated here:
February 20, 2010
Troy Patterson
