If WHIP is predictive, why is my ERA so high?

[Sharky]

If WHIP is a decent predictor or indicator of pitching skill, why does my team (almost) lead the league in WHIP, but it is at the bottom of the pack in ERA? It should have evened out by now. And I don't think I have a staff full of HR-prone starters. Very frustrating and so difficult to correct. Any thoughts would be welcome.

[chancellor]

WHIP is a predictor, but not the sole one. HR/9, k/9, BB:k ratio are also some other fairly easy checks to see if there's something skewed.

[Erik]

Too many HR is the most obvious cause. Poor strand rate could also factor in.

My team is similar. 3rd or 4th in WHIP, 7th to 10th (last) in ERA depending on the week. The main culprits are Anibal Sanchez, who's giving up way too many HR, and Steve Cishek and Neftali Feliz, who gave up many runs in few innings, which impacts ERA more than WHIP.

[Judge Jude]

I owned Greg Maddux for the latter years of his career because he had an extreme ERA/Ratio offset - that is, he was so-so in ERA but excellent in Ratio, and many owners bid based on ERA and don't really consider Ratio. So I got Maddux at a discount, basically.

If you are one of those totally ERA-focused, you may be buying weak Ratio guys year after year and not realizing it. Your rivals drop out near the end of bidding because they are discounting the lesser Ratio but you aren't.

It's a theory, anyway...

[Sharky]

WHIP is a predictor, but not the sole one. HR/9, k/9, BB:k ratio are also some other fairly easy checks to see if there's something skewed.

Is there a level at which those should stabilize? Ian Kennedy and James Shields are early culprits. I'm hoping they will regress to the mean on those fronts (and help from Cueto and MadBum should contribute).

[mjl]

Kennedy is giving up a ton of home runs, especially for a guy pitching in Petco (although so far this year Petco is playing about neutral for HR, he has a home ERA of 8.23 and giving up 3 HR/9). For pitchers with 40+ IP, Kennedy has the highest HR/9 - and Shields is second. Neither of them have run that bad HR rates before, so you have to think they'll come down eventually unless there's something different about their pitch quality in general.

I suspect but have not researched that the worse a pitcher is, the less strong the correlation between ERA and WHIP should be, since bad pitchers are more likely to be pulled mid-inning with runners on base and if the reliever allows those runs to score, their ERA goes up but not all the hits that contributed to the run count for their WHIP.