If you have at least a passing familiarity with sabermetrics, you’ve probably heard something like this: Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is what a pitcher’s ERA should have been based on his walks, hit batters, strikeouts, and home runs. In other words, FIP is described as a predictive tool to tell you what should have happened rather than as a retrospective assessment of actual pitcher performance.

But this is wrong. This is a shorthand way of describing FIP that well-meaning analysts (myself included) have used, but I’ve come to realize that by aiming to put FIP in terms of ERA, we’ve actually made it more difficult for people to grasp and embrace what FIP is really telling us. It’s time to change the way we talk about FIP, because while the concept of defense independent stats has gained popularity, there is often push back (by some) against FIP as a measure of value, in part, because of less than ideal presentation.

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