I dont get why people say losses is not a fair cat for pitchers, but everyone thinks wins are fair. A win can be just as much luck as a loss, so both should be cats or neither should be. Remember when Roger Clemens pitched lights out and lost a bunch of 1-0 and 2-0 games? Remember when Wang racked up 19 wins behind a stacked yankee O last year?
To answer the question, yes add losses and make managers consider who they are throwing out there. It rewards quality and takes away from the advantage of streaming SPs. Also set a min of like 30 innings to prevent people from just throwing RPs.
Adding losses didn't stop me last year from doing it. This year, they added a 60 transaction limit, so that'll probably limit my churning.
Maximum IP would also be a better solution. Adding losses, like someone already said, devalues pitchers even more.
i've had a 40-50 transactions limit for the last two years in my league. it seemed to stop churning, but then again i play with managers who frown on churning in general, so take that for what its worth. a weekly IP limit would also do the trick.
Losses devalue starting pitching, RP's get you SV's, ERA, WHIP and L's better than anything but the top end starters. Starters basically get you K's and W's and thats it. I just don't see how this helps a league.
Its like replacing AVG with OPS, all that does is devalues everyone but power hitters who already are the most valuable players.
Holds is even worse as it reduces the value of all pitchers except setup men which makes hitters more valuable than pitchers since they give you more cats.
If you want to add a 6th category it should be adding value to all players or to the undervalued ones already.
I'd personally start with a transactions limit to curb churning first before tinkering with the scoring format. But if need be, I'd replace K's with K/9 before I would add losses. If you add losses as a cat, what do you plan on adding on the hitting side? That is unless you're cool with playing a 5x6 format.
I don't know a league software that does this, but i've always thought the ideal way to deal with churning is to pro-rate cumulative stats to a fixed max number of starts per week.
ie if you set the max starts at 7, here's how the accumulation would work
We didnt have a churning problem but in our league we enjoy as much strategy as possible. So we added losses last year and it was great. Not sure Id like it in ROTO but for H2H it was fine. We are shortening up the max trans a little more this season as well. Doing this helps seperate the pitchers. i think plenty of pitchers are very similar when you keep in broad. I wouldn't say go overboard, but creating a few cats other than the standard 5x5 adds more strategy to the game IMO.
The first year I did roto we had losses as a category, and we all hated it. There is not a worse feeling than having your pitcher throw a gem, and lose 2-1, and you get the L. Not one person in my league liked it, and we ditched it. H2H maybe, but in my experience, it's terrible in roto.
What we talked about doing last year, though ended up not following through on, is to charge a dollar a transaction after a certain limit. That money goes into the pot. So let's say you have a 50 maximum, and someone makes 72 moves, they have to throw $22 into the pot.
We didn't do it because we didn't want to give an advantage to the guys who have money to burn, but it's something to think about for money leagues.
You can also try changing cumulative categories like K's into a non-cumulative category like K\9. We use W,SV,ERA,WHIP, and K/9 and have no problems with churning.
If you do go with these 5 cats, you have to put in a minimum IP limit otherwise RP's become too valuable.
Don't try to strike everyone out. Strikeouts are boring besides that they're fascist. Throw some ground balls it's more democratic. - Crash Davis
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by FrankGore » Thu Mar 01, 2007 3:46 am 
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