I am the commissioner of a fantasy baseball league (head to head) and last year we had a team that didn't draft one starting pitcher in the draft and ended up with the best record in the league. Needless to say that he killed every team he faced in the offensive categories (AVG, HR, R, RBI, SB) and still won most weeks in pitching. The reason he won pitching is that each week he would make moves to pick up pitchers who would pitch twice for the week. By doing that he would win K's and W's and he also had a good reliever so he'd win Saves as well. The ERA and WHIP would depend on how good the outings were for his pitchers.
Is there a way to make pitching more important? To weight it more so that just merely picking up 2 start pitchers won't cut it?
Fantasy Baseball is supposed to be somewhat realistic. To me, not drafting a pitcher and still doing well doesn't seem like it is right.
The most common methods are to either put a limit on the number of roster moves or add/change categories that hurt the strategy. Adding Losses or changing K to K/9 are usually the most popular ideas.
kcuber wrote:I am the commissioner of a fantasy baseball league (head to head) and last year we had a team that didn't draft one starting pitcher in the draft and ended up with the best record in the league. Needless to say that he killed every team he faced in the offensive categories (AVG, HR, R, RBI, SB) and still won most weeks in pitching. The reason he won pitching is that each week he would make moves to pick up pitchers who would pitch twice for the week. By doing that he would win K's and W's and he also had a good reliever so he'd win Saves as well. The ERA and WHIP would depend on how good the outings were for his pitchers.
Is there a way to make pitching more important? To weight it more so that just merely picking up 2 start pitchers won't cut it?
Fantasy Baseball is supposed to be somewhat realistic. To me, not drafting a pitcher and still doing well doesn't seem like it is right.
Any help?
Thanks.
This is a tough one, but you've got to realize that this manager was playing within the rules. What I have seen done to combat this is placing a limit on number of transactions. This would severly hamper a strategy such as the one described above.
Another responder mentioned switching the league from K's to K/9. I don't really like K/9, but I guess I wouldn't be opposed to it. The real question is whether or not your league has an innings limit. It sounds like it should have an innings limit if it doesn't. This would eliminate any need to switch from K's to K/9. Hope this helps. Good luck.
thats a very good topic to bring up because i know alot of commish's(myself included) go through the same topic and want to know the best way to deal with it...i personally dont like it because like the original person said a manager can jus focus on offense and not worry about pitching, its better to have to worry about buidling a more balanced team
in my league i'm pretty sure that that im gonna put a limit on the number of transactions that can be made during the year, i know some managers arent gonna like that, but its the fairest way to handle the situation
the next question should be what is the number of transactions that i should allow?
Another way is to add more pitching slots. If there are more pitchers you can keep on your teams, the quality of what is left on FA will go down to either render the strategy useless or cause it much more serious problems.
I agree with the previous posts that putting a limit on the number of transactions is the best way to keep this from happening. If you put a cap in place, you won't need to change your stat categories.
We had a limit last year of 44, but to be honest that was pretty tight - I had a hard time staying under it.
But even with a cap, you're inevitably going to have this problem: Owners who make the playoffs will pick up and drop pitchers on a daily basis in an effort to try and win a playoff series. At that point it will come down to Ks and Ws. I've been guilty of doing this myself, and it works sometimes, but not always. Many times the owner who has hoarded the most transactions and yet made the playoffs will be in a good position to win it all.
just place a max number of offensive players... if you go 25rounds, you can only have 17 hitters... 9 starters and 8 bench people.. and 8 pitchers...this forces him to have pitchers on his roster at all times. So he can focus on hitting for 17 rounds then turn to pitching.. you could also lower the max # of hitters and raise the min of pitchers.. its the simplest idea without changing the catagories...
also seems like he was a very active manager.. type of person everyone wants in his league.. if he fail i bet you all would have been happy.. its just managers preference as to how they like to manage a team..I do not think you can change the league because he has a different style.. i mean you can, but its not right..
Something we do in our Yahoo Plus league (with weekly roster changes) is set a cap on how many innings pitched you can have in a season. We have seven pitching slots -- five SPs and two RPs -- and allow 1,400 innings pitched total.
That's enough so that if a manager wants to bypass saves entirely and play seven starters (two with RP eligibility) -- which someone inevitably always tries -- he is able to get about 200 innings, essentially a full season, from each pitcher.
However, if somebody tries to start five to seven two-start pitchers every week of the season, he will eventually run out of innings.
Also, keep in mind that when you're going with two-start guys, you're usually starting some pitchers of lesser quality -- which means your ERA and WHIP should balloon. Those two categories usually work as a checks-and-balances system against constantly playing two-start guys.
That is, unless you're really, REALLY good at finding two-start guys with great matchups. In which case, all the more power to you.
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by kcuber » Sat Jan 20, 2007 11:28 pm 
