Relief Pitching FIP and Team Wins

San Diego, Atlanta and Cleveland have the best relief pitching in baseball. 

Here are the top ten teams Relief Pitching xFIP thus far:

1. San Diego  3.65
2. Atlanta   3.66
3. Cleveland   3.68
4. San Francisco   3.75
5. Philadelphia   3.78
6. NY Mets   3.90
7. Minnesota   3.92
8. Seattle   3.94
9. Miami   3.98
10. Baltimore   4.00

Remember that FIP is a stat that estimates a pitcher's run prevention independent of defense. It's based on only Strikeout, walks, hit by pitches and home runs allowed. xFIP finds a pitcher's FIP, but it uses projected home-run rate instead of actual home runs allowed. The home run rate is determined by that season's league average HR/FB rate.  FIP uses the ERA scale. More can be found about the FIP and xFIP calculations on Fangraphs HERE

Since we don't have xFIP prior to 2002, I used overall relief pitching FIP and compared team win total for each team since 1997.

FIP is on the y-axis. Each season in the x-axis. The higher the FIP on the y-axis (using the ERA scale) the worse the relief pitching.

Red dots below are the teams with 95 wins in each season since 1997. Notice that only 26 teams of the 119 teams who had 95 wins since 1997 had relief pitching FIPs higher than 4.00.  That's only. 21.8%.  

Of course many things can happen in the playoffs.  For fun, how many of these 95+ win teams since 1997 won the World Series? 

Here are the other World Series winners who didn't win 95 games.

The top 5 worst Relief Pitching FIP World Series winners:

2023  Texas Rangers

2010  San Francisco Giants

2006  St. Louis Cardinals

2000 New York Yankees

1997 Florida Marlins

Each of these teams made up for their relief pitching deficiencies with either top 10 starting pitching or top ten ability to create and score runs.