There are endless metrics that evaluate pitchers in today’s baseball world, and xFIP is certainly one of them. It’s the expected version of FIP - Fielding Independent Pitching - which, in itself, is something of an expected statistic. How good a pitcher probably should have been if they’d had a normalized HR/FB rate and defense like most other pitchers had, in other words.
It’s imperfect. It’s very imperfect. Most pitching metrics, if taken in lone form, are. The reality is, however, that 127 pitchers in Major League Baseball logged at least 100 IP during the 2023 season, and 60 of them had lower xFIPs than Dylan Cease, whose 4.