Here's the problem with doing it the way you suggest, JG:
Even if only two of your pitchers are on the same schedule and pitching the same day, at the end of the seacon you'll wind up with 30 odd fewer starts than someone else in the league whose five starters are all on a different day.
To me, that unfairly penalizes you for something you have no control over - the real-life manager's pitching rotation.
Think of it this way:
If there are 6 of us in the league - I'm hoping for you, me, Crabby, DB, DM, and JL.
If that’s the case, we’ll draft 30 starting pitchers.
Yeah, there are only a handful of “aces’, but once we get past those, there is still at least a decent #1 starter on almost very team.
Opening day is Sun, April 2, when there’s only one game.
Then on Mon, April 3, there are 13 games involving 26 teams.
Here’s the schedule:
Nationals at Mets
Pirates at Brewers
Red Sox at Rangers
Cubs at Reds
Devil Rays at Orioles
Cardinals at Phillies
Diamondbacks at Rockies
Tigers at Royals
Braves at Dodgers
Angels at Mariners
Marlins at Astros
Giants at Padres
Yankees at Athletics
Let’s say, for example, your 5 starters are Martinez (Mets), Mussina (Yankees), Sabbitha (Indians), Pettitte (Astros), and Smoltz (Atlanta).
Except for Pedro (maybe), who in that group is really one of the handful of “Aces”?
Yet all could be possibly considered their team’s #! Starter, and all could possibly pitch on opening day.
So it’s certainly possible that after the draft you could wind up with any or all of the above five.
Well, not likely that you’ll have all 5, but I bet at the end of the draft there are at least one or two of us who have two and possibly three of the pitchers that start opening day.
Remember, we’re only gonna draft 30 starting pitchers.
If I looked it up right now, I could guess who the 30 would be, and I bet I'd get 25-26 of them right, and I’d also bet that out of the 30 that we do draft, 25-26 of them wind up being their team’s opening day starter.
So let’s say you have three of those guys. So you go with Pedro on Monday, and pass on Smoltz and Mussina.
Then on Tuesday, you use Pettitte, and on Wednesday you go with Sabbitha.
Now it’s Thursday and Friday, and you have no starting pitcher.
Those two days are gone forever. If we only use one starter a day, you can’t “make up” those two days with your bench like we can at the other positions.
The point is that it is theoretically possible, due to the MLB schedule and the “luck” of pitching rotations, that at the end of the season you could have anywhere form 33-34 starts for the season, up to as many as maybe 170.
What my system does is say, “Look…you have 5 starters. The season is 162 games long. You can’t have more than 162 starts, (which is possible your way). All we’re doing is guaranteeing everyone the same chance at getting those 162 starts. Which days those 162 starts take place on doesn’t really matter.”
Plus, your way, what we don’t want to happen will start to happen: people will start to drop and add starters just because of the rotation.
Suppose there are 6 of us, and we draft 30 starters.
The you discover that two of them are pitching the seond day of the season, and you look at the schedule and days off and everything, and figure out that for their next 6 turns they’re both gonna be pitching the same day.
That means you will lose 6 starts that you can never get back.
So you drop one – let’s say he was the 24th starter selected – and pick up the 37th best starter as a free agent.
Wouldn’t you do that? Wouldn’t the drop in quality from 24th best to 37th best be worth it to pick up the 6 starts?
Meanwhile, the guy you drop helps someone out that’s in the same spot that you are, so he picks up your guy and drops someone else.
And on and on it will go.
What will happen is the entire focus of the game will become making sure that you have a decent starting pitcher on your team for every day of the season.
And if we’re only gonna pick 30 starters, there will always be someone available that’s better than not getting any starting pitching points at all on that day.
I'd much rather have the stability with our teams where you can say:
"These are my 5 starters. If there are no injuries, I know that bewteen the five of them I'll have 160-170 opportunities, so all I have to worry about is figuring out which games I may want to bench one of them because they're pitching at Coors or whatever"
Naturally, if one of them bombs for the season, or gets injured, you're gonna make a move anyway, but it will be for the same reasons that managers do in real life.
I hope I explained all of this OK.....This particular question, I think, is the most important one one out there.
If Yahoo set it up with a maximum games at each position for starting pitchers, this would not be a problem.
Look at our Yahoo Basketball League when you look at the max games played chart.
If for baseball they just showed "162" as the maximum for the "Starting Pitcher" position, just as they will for the other positions I presume, this whole thing would take care of itself.
And if they did do it that way, wouldn't you have all of your starting pitchers playing every day (except for those rare days when you wanted to bench them because they were at Coors or something, and knowing that if you left all of them in every day you would use up your 162 games before the end of the season since, barring injury, each starter will make 33-35 starts each, so you would rather pick the spots yourself when to bench them, rather than having them be benched because you used up your whole 162 games?).
My way does it exactly the way we would be playing it if Yahoo did have the 162 game max on starting pitchers as they do for the other positions, except that when you hit the 162 mark it won't automatically stop counting your points (We'll just have to do it manually, but it won't be a big deal since if anyone goes over the limit by accident, it won't be until near the very end of the season).
