There’s another important issue which needs to be addressed:
In my post in which I went over the scoring values, I wrote the following:
They don't give you the option of limiting your starting pitchers to 162 games total as I had hoped, which, since the best SPs typically start 33-35 games each season, would have added the strategy element of having to decide when not to use a SP. I set it up with 5 starting pitchers and 5 relievers, but they all play every day, since there could be days when anywhere from none to all of your pitchers could play)
I realized that with no limit on the number of games for starting pitchers, the following would inevitably happen:
If there are six, or even eight, of us in the league, we will draft 30-40 SPs, so there will be tons of good ones still available as free agents at the conclusion of the draft.
What I would do, and what would be perfectly sound and legal strategy, would be to drop all five of my starters every day and add 5 news ones to make sure that I had 5 SPs going every day.
What I would do is this:
Let’s say opening day is Monday.
On Sunday, I would look at Monday’s Probable Pitchers and drop any of them that were pitching on Monday, replacing them with guys who were pitching on Tuesday.
With the two-day lag in adding/dropping players, the guys I drop Sunday would still be on my Team Monday, and the new guys would become part of my team on Tueday, just in time to pitch.
Then, on Monday, I would do the same. I’d drop everyone who was scheduled to pitch Tuesday and replace them with pitchers scheduled to pitch Wednesday.
And I’d do that all season long.
So naturally, everyone else would follow the same strategy – they’d have to. I’d be getting 5 starts a day for 180 days, while anyone else who just holds on to their original 5 starters would wind up with only 165 or so.
And I would have to start doing this, because if I don’t and someone else adopts that strategy first, they immediately get 5 extra starts – worth maybe 50-75 points more or less.
Even if we have a “gentleman’s agreement” not to do this, it can’t be prevented.
Suppose I have a starter that I want to drop because he’s shit. If I drop him on Tuesday, I’m naturally gonna look for a guy pitching on Thursday or Friday so I can pick up an extra start.
This is perfectly acceptable strategy in Roto and HTH leagues, by the way. All of the games sites, as well as Rotoworld, publish the upcoming week’s schedules, usually in spreadsheet form, so if you have, say, a hockey player whose team is scheduled for only two games in the upcoming week, you can drop him and replace him with a guy playing four times.
Anyway, this is not the way I envision our game being played. First of all, it will really become a daily game by necessity, which is something, I think, that none of us want.
And, as far as pitching goes, it will totally eliminate the realism factor and reduce the skill in drafting pitchers to nothing, while emphasizing the importance of guessing right on which 5 pitchers to select for the upcoming day.
PLUS….it gives a huge advantage to the person(s) who are able to be awake at the right time(s) of day to claim free agents first, since theoretically we’d all be going after the same guys.
Hopefully you guys get the picture b/c I’m not sure if I explained the problem very well.
Anyway, here’s the solution I came up with:
While you can’t create a maximum number of games played for each starting pitcher position, or a total max for all of them, they do allow you to make “Games Started” a stat category.
So if we agree among ourselves that the maximum number of starts allowed will be 162, and award a +1 for every start, then Yahoo will keep track of it for us.
On the bottom right of your team’s Home Page there’s a link to “Team Log” that “displays all players that have ever earned fantasy stats for this team, regardless of whether or not they are still on the team.”
So you can manage your 162 game max through that, plus I’ll include it every day in the scoring update.
Now you’re free to adopt any strategy you want. You can use up all 162 starts the first 4 or 5 weeks of the season by picking 5 new starters for every day, or try and space it out over the whole season.
And since, as I said earlier somewhere, the average #1 or #2 starter makes 33-35 starts a year, you’ll have to pick some spots during the season to bench one of your starting pitchers, or you’ll hit the 162 mark before the end of the season and may lose out on some more favorable match-ups later.
As far as the superfluous +1 point for each start (it’s necessary, otherwise the number of starts won’t appear on your Team Log, so it will be much harder to keep track of your starts and to have the number verified), well, if we all hit 162, then the net result of an additional 162 points will be zilch, because we’ll all get the 162 points.
And if you screw up somehow at the end, or if one of your starters misses a couple of turns because of a minor injury and you didn’t want to drop him, then at the very end you can go with the strategy of dropping guys whose last start may have been Thursday of the last week, and adding guys who still have a start left.
And if someone screws up so totally that they only wind up with 159 or 160 starts at the end, then they deserve to have those 2 or 3 less points than everyone else.
The only slight flaw in this idea, of course, is that if someone goes over the 162 mark, we’ll have to manually deduct the points for any start after #162.
But I don’t think that’s gonna happen, because, as I said, we’ll publish everyone’s number every day, and each of us will be able to track it ourselves through our Team Log.
