Kyle Gibson finished the 2022 season with the highest ERA among qualified National League starting pitchers. If ERA isn't your jam, he also had the second-highest FIP, the fourth-highest xERA, and the fifth-highest xFIP. But there's a silver lining to all that: Kyle Gibson was a qualified starting pitcher.
Only 22 NL pitchers qualified for the ERA title this past season. That's an average of 1.47 qualified starters per team. That isn't very many. In other words, simply pitching 162 innings is an achievement in this era of baseball. The vast majority of pitchers can't do it. Gibson can, and he did.
Moreover, while his numbers don't look so great compared to other qualified starters, that's not really a fair group to compare him against. Qualified starters tend to be the very best pitchers in the league. Being one of the worst among that group is not the same as being one of the worst overall.
Consider, for example, Gibson's 4.28 FIP. That looks bad next to that of other qualified starters, but it's only a little bit higher than the league-average FIP for a starting pitcher. The same goes for most of Gibson's numbers – they look bad compared to those of other qualified pitchers, but overall they're pretty close to average.
Gibson was never dominant during his Philadelphia Phillies tenure, but he stayed healthy and he consistently threw five or six innings per start. All things considered, he was pretty much an average pitcher, and that's really all you can ask from a 34-year-old fifth starting making $7.67 million.
Grade: C
Kyle Gibson pitched plenty of innings, and he gave his team a chance to win more often than not. All he was was a number five starter, but that's all the Phillies needed him to be.
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