Advice on creating "real" bench spots

[JesseHill]

I play in a redraft H-to-H league with 9 batting slots, 6 pitching slots, and 4 bench slots.

We're looking to change to an auction keeper league next year with a deeper roster - probably somewhere around 25 player teams.

What we've found in our current league is that all of our bench spots basically turn into extra SP slots, and teams (including mine) rotate their bench pitchers in through the course of the week. In essence - these are no longer bench slots as all players on the roster start during the week. There are exceptions of course, where a player will have a bench hitter or two to cover off days or because a player that we don't want to drop is in a slump. For the most part though - teams carry 10 pitchers and play all 10 of them.

We'd like to discourage this in our next league, and have real bench players. The main reason here is to encourage trades.

I've heard some ideas:

a) Add more ratio-based pitching stats so that managers won't want to start weak pitchers. Have you found that 6 stats (standard 5 plus K/BB?) is enough to keep people from trotting out as many pitchers as they can?

b) Set a maximum innings limit. I actually kind of like this idea because I feel like it not only will give us real bench slots, but prevents streaming (especially in the playoffs). I also don't like getting destroyed in pitching because my opponent has a bunch of 2 start pitchers in a given week. Seems like this isn't an option in most head to head leagues though? It's only available in roto or points leagues?

Any other ideas? I don't want to restrict the number of starters per day - seems like that would cause some real problems. Maybe just expanding the roster from 19 - 25 is enough to solve our problem?

Thanks, much appreciated.

[bigmck]

Streaming of pitchers can cause a problem in the league. Personally I don't like to have any bench players. That stops the streaming. It sounds like that your league prefers a bench. One thing you could do is have a limit of say, two pitcher bench moves in a week. This would stop a team from using all of their pitchers in a given week. I think I would perfer that instead of max innings. That seems too artifical. == In one of the leagues I am in, we don't have any bench players but we have two moves each week to pick up players. There are 11 owners in the league and it is a NL only player pool. There are not enough good pitchers out there to do streaming. but you can pickup players as you need them. -- Just a few ideas.

[RedSoxNation04]

We play 11X11 H2H and carry a 23 man roster with 2 DL spots. Some teams carry extra pitchers and some carry extra hitters. I have to say that we haven't really seen streaming except in the case where a team, mine was one of them, experienced a number of injuries and had to spot start appropriately to meet minimum weekly innings (30).

FWIW, our pitching cats are:

W, L, SV, HLD, CG, SHO, K, H, K/BB, ERA, WHIP

I've found that pitching is quite valuable in a H2H league. Play around with your categories and consider upping your weekly innings limit. It might do what you are trying to do.