Stopping streaming on Yahoo or ESPN?

[mariners47]

My friends and I have played in a daily H2H league on Yahoo the past few seasons. We love being able to change hitters daily and also the H2H format. One problem we've run into is how devalued starting pitching has become since you can just stream starters every day and win W's and K's pretty much automatically. That way you don't even bother to draft starters just so your offense and bullpen can be as strong as possible.

Are there any rules in Yahoo or ESPN leagues you can set to prevent streaming in a daily H2H format?

Thanks for any help.

[ensanimal]

You could use max moves in a season, or a max innings limit every week.

[mariners47]

We really dislike max moves, because you could just save all your moves for the playoffs and stream then, plus it limits your ability to change hitters throughout the season.

And as far as I can tell on Yahoo there is no H2H innings max per week. Is this true on ESPN also?

[KoopaTroopa211]

Yahoo has a max innings/season option.

[MTUCache]

Is it possible to tweak your scoring categories?

By changing from W to QS, or from W to W-L, or from K to K-BB, etc, you're encouraging quality over just quantity.

Or you could double up on an averaging category (like ERA) and add in another hitting category (TB or OPS) to even it out.

If the league's broken you need to fix the broken rules... it'll be tough to fix them by adding more rules that could present even more loopholes or problems.

[Fantasy Sports Genie]

Bwa ha ha... I personally hate streaming, though I realize some leagues appreciate it as "part of the game". So while I think it didn't yet make its way to the What's New page, this year our baseball game actually does introduce a league option to help with this. It isn't perfect, but should be better than what we offered in the past.

If you create a H2H league, you should now have a setting to select the maximum number of player acquisitions per week. In this case 'week' means 'H2H matchup'. This does not count players added to your team via trades or commissioner forced adds, only players added via free agency or waivers. This should give you some sort of throttle on streaming.

Let me know what you think.

[mariners47]

I saw that and it's definitely something we're considering. The only hesitation is we do like to switch around our hitters a lot during the week. We don't mind it if you bring in 3 players to make sure you've got a lineup on Mondays and Thursdays. Ideally we'd still be able to allow that but disallow streaming starters.

I think in a perfect world we would be able to set the min/max starts a team could have per week. Also, in response to going to more rate friendly stats, then starters become devalued for the opposite reason. A team with all quality relievers and no starters wins a disproportionate amount of the categories.

[KoopaTroopa211]

changing from W to QS

[hot4tx]

A few things we've used to combat streaming:

1) As mentioned above you can make it a 6x6 league, making the additional pitching category a counting category negatively affected by innings pitched like Runs against, Ls, or HR against. That helps balance out the streaming gains in Ws and Ks with the downside in your Ls/HRagainst/Ragainst category plus the damage done to your ERA and WHIP.

2) You can set max moves however you want, but in the playoffs you can adjust each playoff team to 5 or 10 less than the max for each round. Say you have 50 max moves, you could adjust everyone's moves to 45 at the start of round one. With only five moves in the week, teams that rely on streaming are done. Then at the start of round two adjust everyone's moves back to 45 to give everyone 5 moves that week, and so on. Like I said you can discuss how many moves teams should get per playoff round, and whether the championship round should double to number of moves (since it's two weeks). Just make sure you discuss this before-hand so that everyone understands the new rules before they draft a team of streamers.

3) Make a rule that if someone streams, every other manager gets to punch said person in the junk. If it's a girl, then everyone gets one snip at her hair.

[Tarquin]

This season there is an option in yahoo to put max moves per week (Which I don't think was available last year). That is a better option to me than max moves per season.

The only people that are making more than 4-5 moves per week are streamers, so that should be a good solution.