Affirmative defense. An affirmative defense to a civil lawsuit or criminal charge is a fact or set of facts other than those alleged by the plaintiff or prosecutor which, if proven by the defendant, defeats or mitigates the legal consequences of the defendant's otherwise unlawful conduct.
Quick Answer. In baseball, the acronym WHIP stands for walks plus hits per inning pitched and is a way of measuring the efficacy of a pitcher. WHIP essentially measures the number of base runners allowed by each pitcher and is used in sabermetric player analysis. Continue Reading.
In baseball, a statistic called FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, measures a pitcher's ERA over time independent of the defense behind him. Because the pitcher has little control over balls that fall in as hits, FIP aims to measure only the things that the pitcher is specifically responsible for.