League leaders in xFIP

Over the years statisticians have come up with a ton of different advanced metrics aimed at looking at baseball from different angles. One of those angles is to try to strip any luck away from performance. It is known that for pitchers, other than home runs, strikeouts and walks, the rest of what happens when they pitch is subject to luck as it depends on fielders. Researchers have also recognized that pitchers can be "groundball pitchers" or "flyball pitchers." There are also line drives where a hitter hits the ball more solidly. The different kinds of hits impact the likelihood of getting hits (ground balls go for hits a higher percentage of the time than flyballs but are never home runs, line drives are much more often hits and extra base hits...) Finally, research has shown that the rate of flyballs going for homeruns is mostly random.

To clean up the info, the concept of xFIP was created. It stands for expected fielding independent pitching, or how well the players past performance indicates they will perform going forward. It pretty much takes the ideas of FIP and adds a component that smooths out home runs hit in the past.

Looking at the leaderboard today (on fangraphs.com), there were a few interesting names:

1. Clayton Kershaw - 2.19
2. Danny Salazar - 2.38
3. Michael Pineda - 2.43
4. Corey Kluber - 2.50
5. Carlos Carrasco - 2.65
6. Chris Archer - 2.72
7. Jake Arrieta -2.76
8. Gerrit Cole -2.77
9. Felix Hernandez - 2.87
10. Max Scherzer - 2.95

Some of the names: Pineda, Archer, Arrieta, Cole, Hernandez and Scherzer seem to be where they belong. But some of the others, Kershaw, Salazar and Kluber and Carrasco seem far out of place.

In all 4 cases we are looking at pitchers K'ing more than 10 guys per 9 innings, and BB'ing under 2.5 per 9. All except Salazar have been plagued with very high BABIP (batting average [on] balls in play) rates which generally even out to over time. All of them curently have ERA's over 4, but if they can maintain their performance (and even more so if they improve on it) they should all see significant improvement in their more classic statistics going forward.

I don't know but I don't need advanced metric to tell me Felix Hernandez is the best pitcher this year out of that group!
Too me xFIP is just as flawed as WAR.

I think it should be noted that Clay Buchholz is #11 on this list.

Looks like more sabermetric mumbo jumbo that a statastician made up.
A prediction based on past performance and how hard and where balls are hit, while stripping away luck?

Kershaw is number one, but isn't even close to the best pitcher on his own team this year.
Grienke (5-1, 1.52 era) dominates Kershaw (2-2, 4.24) in every single pitching stat except strikeouts, yet Greinke isn't even in the Top 10 on that list because some statastician's concoction of luck-based formulas heavily favors strikeout pitchers.

In fact, Kershaw has been so mediocre this season, he has a negative WAR.
I'm a Dodger fan and want Kershaw to do great, but that stat and list is rubbish.