The Best Pitching Performances in M’s History

The “Inside the Book” Blog had an interesting post up the other day riffing on an idea from an Athletics Nation blogger named Dave Wishinsky: FIP perfect games. The idea’s pretty simple: a traditional no-hitter/perfect game (and other stats that use hits allowed, like game scores) essentially give credit to the pitcher when balls in play are turned into outs. FIP ignores balls in play and focuses solely on HRs, BBs, Ks, and HBPs – events that the pitcher is more directly responsible for. Tango asked, how many starters have pitched a game that resulted in a FIP of 0 – the formula’s in his post, but essentially this means a game without any walks, hit batsmen or homers allowed, and at least 15 strikeouts (technically, 14Ks up until 1993, this was when the FIP constant moved from 3.0 to 3.2). That’s a pretty high bar, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as any surprise that there’ve been fewer FIP perfect games than “real” p...