Gently Discouraging Streaming

[SumG]

A bunch of managers in my league have been grumbling about managers streaming pitchers, and I'm wondering if there's any tweaks I can make to scoring to gently discourage it or even if I should be doing anything. PLEASE NOTE: I don't want to make any changes that make it untenable to pick up a spot starter here and there, or swing the pendulum so far the other way that a manager could be competitive with nothing more than middle relievers. I'd want to keep it to just making it more difficult for a manager who doesn't draft an SP to be competitive week in week out.

H2H 6x6 league (W, QS, SV, Ks, ERA, WHIP)

[GreenMtn!]

There's multiple ways to limit streaming if that's what you want to do.

One way is to limit transactions and the other way is to adjust scoring categories. Or you could use a combination of both.

If you ad Holds as a category, managers will need to have more relievers on their rosters - limiting the number of SP they can stream. At the same time, though, this adds a category that streamers can win without using SP. I don't really know how effective that would be. You could also swap Ks with K/9 and Wins with Wins-Losses to encourage quality over quantity.

[Pochucker]

We charge $1 fot every transaction

[milliondollarsleeper]

limiting moves doesnt discourage streaming, it just limits league activity. whether you have unlimited moves or simply 2, your goal is to still start the most SP and max out your innings pitched.

adding stats like Losses only punishes pitchers and skews the scoring.

the best (and only) solution is to have a weekly max IP. currently its not an option because i am the first to actually use it. it was a lot of adding, counting and trusting other managers, but it was a success. i have bombarded yahoo with requests for the option and encouraged others to follow suit, so hopefully this year we will be able to take a step in the right direction.

between my 5x7 scoring and weekly max ip, i plan on changing the way ppl play h2h baseball

[bigmck]

There is one easy way to solve streaming. Don't have ten owners in a league and use all 30 MLB teams for your player pool. If you have only ten owners, use either the NL or AL, not both. This way you have to draft the good pitchers as the free agents are slim pickings. It puts some challenge in the game instead of everyone having MLB starters riding the Fantasy Bench.

[Matthias]

We limit our annual waiver adds to 60 per team. That's about 2 per week which is plenty for anyone who wants to keep their roster filled with the darling of the week and adjust for any injuries. Every year we have one person (although not always the same guy) who hits the cap and one or two others who realize in the last month of the season that they have to be more careful. But for 75% of the league, they don't even notice it.

Another way to limit streaming is to have your stats organized such that people are penalized for bad stats. So instead of Wins, we have Wins minus Losses. And if the loss from starting everyone with a pulse is greater the gain of doing so, people just won't do it.

[shawngee03]

i have found that the best way is to not play w d-bags that would stream in the first place (sorry to anyone out there that would stream...i just think its really bush)

i enacted the 4 max moves per week thing last year and it worked good. true it still allows someone to stream 4 starts a week....but thats better than 20. 4 extra starts can easily be made up for by quality SPing

plus 4 allows teams that have injurie not to be screwed

[shawngee03]

.

between my 5x7 scoring and weekly max ip, i plan on changing the way ppl play h2h baseball

can you tell what your cats are for 5X7. im interested and might start a thread about it.

i would guess regular hitting, and pitching would be W, ERA, WHIP, K, one more SP cat, SV, HLD

but thats just a guess. 5 cats for SP...2 for RP

[jsbest1977]

I use espn as my site but they have an option for max starts per week.

The 1 fault in this, like last year, we set it to 9. Well come the last day of the week, if you were at 8 and start 4 SP, it counts all 4.

But if you hit 9 as of Friday or Saturday, it would continue to count stats for pitchers who did not start the game.

Otherwise if an option like that isn't available, like others said, punish owners for bad starts or limit moves per week.

[carter]

i really like milliondollars idea of a "WEEKLY IP MAX", that really looks like the be-all-end-all solution (and so simple ).. until then i'm gonna try Hr as a pitching stat, which i think is a good way to evaluate pitchers anyway (and the league is more then 5x5 so it fits ok), and 3 moves weekly max because people effectively stream hitters too