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he has his fans in SF at least...from deep in the comments section of http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-eve...of-the-giants/
"Sabers suffer from the same hubris that scouts have been accused of, by relying so much on tools that are still a work in progress. FIP and DIPS are great theories but the realization slowly (like molasses, or really, like pitch tar) moving through the saber community is that there ARE pitchers who can control BIP, and none of our tools do a very good job of identifying them, at least definitively. Right now, it takes around 7 years worth of SP to be able to say that a pitcher can keep his BABIP significantly below the .300 mean of the league. And forget it about RP.
But the skill does exist. Tom Tippett analyzed and wrote about the pitchers in history who were good but did not fit the DIPS mode – over a dozen years ago! – and yet few sabers are aware of this. And sabermetrician Mike Fast in an interview a few years ago noted, after he got to go behind the curtain with the Astros, that in the minors, controlling BIP is a skill."
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