Innings pitched limit, how to handle

[titanut]

I am currently 41 innings over. My SPs are: Wood, Hudson, Willis,
Seo, Batista and R Franklin. I think I should start them everytime
except for horrible matchups and not worry about the innings limit.
I figure an injury will occur or Seo or Willis will cool off. Am I right ?

[jdh]

I think that you are better off just using starting pitchers whenever you have favorable matchups. As you said, injuries and other problems will wind up making up for it later on in the season. Even if you get lucky and don't get nailed with injuries, if you can use up your pitching innings with decent stats, you can then trade pitchers away for hitters after your innings are used up.

The only caution that I would have would be not to totally use up your limit if you still need saves. A typical closer throws 75 innings a year, or 15 innings per month, so you might want to leave enough room to use your closers for the rest of the season. For example, if you are close to running out of innings by the end of August and have three closers, you will want to leave 45 innings for closers.

[bleach168]

Last month, I was 70 innings over, then Ainsworth went down, Contreras went down, Fossum went down, and Moss and Benson decided to play through nagging injuries. Now I'm 21 innings over and dropping.

I think it's okay to be over, just as long as you reserve enough innings for your star pitchers and bullpen. I wouldn't go over 100 innings though, and after the all-star break, I would look to steadily bring that number down if you don't get any injuries.