Roster + Scoring Advice; No Min IP...

[Wood+Prior=DL]

All,

I'm looking for some advice on the following scoring cats and roster spots in a 10 team ESPN league. To add to the complexity, it's a H2H cat league with weekly lineups, and I cannot set a min innings pitched, unfortunately, to make sure someone does not only start shut-down relievers. I've tried to tweak the settings to promote SP use; let me know if anyone thinks I should add other scoring cats or additional roster spots, as well (another SP spot or hitters spot? Want to make sure that I have proper depth...); thank you...

Current Roster Size: 22
Total Starters: 17
Total On Bench: 5 (2 DL)

POSITIONS STARTERS

Catcher (C) 1
First Base (1B) 1
Second Base (2B) 1
Third Base (3B) 1
Shortstop (SS) 1
Outfield (OF) 3
Utility (UTIL) 1

Pitcher (P) 3
Starting Pitcher (SP) 3
Relief Pitcher (RP) 2

Bench (BE) 5
Disabled List (DL) 2

SCORING

Batting

Batting Average (AVG)
Home Runs (HR)
On Base plus Slugging Pct (OPS)
Runs Scored (R)
Runs Batted In (RBI)
Stolen Bases (SB)
Strikeouts (K)

Pitching

Innings Pitched (IP)
Walks plus Hits Per Innings Pitched (WHIP)
Earned Run Average (ERA)
Strikeouts (K)
Wins (W)
Saves (SV)
Holds (HD)

[Trojan Pony]

I'm guessing your league is on ESPN? Yeah, it's absurd they don't have minimum IP... I keep pressing the issue and they keep ignoring me, very annoying... What I wound up doing was adding IP and OBP as 6th categories. IP motivates people to using starting pitching and prevents people from using an all-reliever strategy, which is lame... It's actually worked out better than I expected, pretty much all of the managers in my league have grown to accept it, or even like it. Looks like you have the right idea. But it's still dumb that we even have to do that in the first place...

[Wood+Prior=DL]

Correct; it is an ESPN league, and I also think it's absurd they don't have a minimum IP setting. It's a pretty basic + key setting for ensuring balanced positional use. At any rate, I've added MI + CI spots plus another SP spot + OF spot to add depth to the league...I hope it works out. Thank you for the opinions.

[Matthias]

First, I would go from SP/RP to just P. I hate people gaming the system with a pitcher that is really a reliever playing as a starter. Just get your scoring categories optimized and don't worry about it.

Second, I hate K's as a hitter category. It's really not that meaningful. I would drop K's and then merge Saves & Holds into Saves + Holds.

[Wood+Prior=DL]

Thank you; do you think combining saves + holds would make closers + relievers too trivial?

[Matthias]

No: any reliever worth their salt in the major leagues will also be significant contributors in holding down people's ERA and WHIP.

[Wood+Prior=DL]

Agreed; so your suggestion would be to remove batter Ks and combing saves + holds to increase SP value; any merit to adding QS or too redundant with Ws?

[Wood+Prior=DL]

Thanks again for the help, everyone. I've modified the roster + scoring to the following...

1 C
1 1B
1 2B
1 3B
1 SS
1 MI
1 CI
5 OF
1 Util

9 P

5 BN
2 DL

Batting - HR, OPS, AVG, R, RBI, S
Pitching - ERA, WHIP, K, W, SVHD, IP

I believe the pitching categories are somewhat even now, with 3 cats that benefit RPs + 3 cats that benefit SPs.

[Trojan Pony]

Looks good. That's basically the same setup as my league except we use OBP instead of OPS. Good luck!