I’m going to kick off a separate thread here for anyone that wants to discuss or ask questions about H2H gameplay strategy this year since it is a new format. I think @Leif did a nice job of capturing some of my own thoughts on roster construction and management in H2H, so I’ll post that here to begin the discussion. I’ll be playing H2H in League 13 (with WC playoff format) and am interested in what strategies other owners deploy this year.
Definitely agree on the value of high end RP in H2H - anyone else buy into their potential bump in value?
Here’s a couple great strategy articles that relate to this thread, if folks missed them.
Does anybody know where I can find information on Average Starts per rotation spot and/or managerial tendencies with regards to bullpen management?
Some other thoughts on RP:
The Closer designation costs a lot!
For $1 you can pick up guys who average over 6 Pts/IP and seem like a safer bet for a high IP total.
We should be able to extract much closer to full value from backup RP by rotating them through just 5 roster spots. I seems like that can’t really be done with the SP or Batting slots.
League 935 has three or four teams currently on top of it (or in the top 5) all aggressively pursuing SP accumulation to (so far) great success. Will report back on what, this early, has been a winning strategy.
A member (@Jphelder) also just posted to the league message board detailing his pursuit of SP innings as the master strategy behind his hot 3-0 start, so it should be interesting to see if there is a run on SP and how the league strategy might evolve.
I’ve currently got 16 SP rostered, and have found it definitely doesn’t automatically mean I’m going to get the max of 14 GS (which is my #1 goal each week).
Matchup 1: 15/22
Matchup 2: 9/14
Matchup 3: 12/14
One idea I’m playing with for next year is attempting to roster the entire staffs for either 2 or 3 teams. This would come close to ensuring the ability to hit 14 starts while rostering the minimum SP’s needed to do so.
I’m not having any problems staying on target for hitter GP, despite having a 4 man bench, since I valued flexibility in drafting. I’ve got 7 dudes with multi positional eligibility. I think flexibility adds value (not sure how much, but I’d gladly add $1-$2) for anybody using a similar strategy.
Despite going SP heavy, I think this format rewards paying for top quality pitching. If I could redo the draft (first Ottoneu experience, 1st H2H league…) I’d still try my current strategy but would spend even more on top flight pitchers.
There are still plenty of SP’s available for owners to pick up if they want to go SP heavy as well, they just need to decide they value the IP over long-term keepers. My gut (which is pretty big) tells me there is WAYYYY to much $ tied up in MiLB and IR players right now…
Pitching has a lot of variance, even among ones and twos. My strategy was to pay for hitting and roster a lot of threes and fours. Now I keep adding pitchers and dropping role players.
I currently have the 2nd most points scored in league 845. It’s a 16 team league so it’s a little different strategy wise but the biggest complaint I’ve been receiving from the members is the 2 starter limit per day. I have decided to use an internal streaming strategy. I have a bunch of SPs and throw them out there whenever possible. Unless the matchup is extremely poor. In roto I use a 7-8 man rotation with the bottom 2 guys in certain matchups. The top 5-6 guys generally go out unless they’re at Coors. I like managing an IP limit better than having to leave two starters on the bench due to limits
Regarding the H2H, this is probably new-thread worthy, but I would enjoy the format more if we upped the SP slots to 4 and just capped the number of starts per week. Really frustrating when you have more than 2 pitchers a day and no pitchers the next 2.
Something with the SP slots needs to be adjusted for H2H. 15 team league, the top 4 teams are the top 4 teams in IP. One team is on pace for over 1,900 IP. For all the discussion about a more realistic baseball experience, H2H has been reduced to a question of math and getting the most starts for your SP possible.
For H2H, there should still be an innings cap so that teams have to think about whether to go for every possible start knowing that there could be consequences later in the season, including playoffs.
The 2 slots should also be expanded to 3 or 4. In one league, I’ve had Kluber, Sevarino and Paxton all grouped on the same day for a couple of weeks now. There’s nothing fun about having to choose which one not to use in a week and it certainly is not realistic.
I’d love to know more about how a team in a league where 600+ players are owned and only 2 pitchers can be started on any given day is on pace for 1900IP on June 14. Is this a situation where the market needs to make a correction? Or will a couple teams always be able to line up endless pitching?
The 3 highest scoring teams are on pace for 1,964 IP, 1,907 IP and 1,751 IP respectively.
Right now the same 3 teams have 14, 17 (4 are on the DL) and 10 SPs respectively.
There is also another team on pace for over 1600 IP and that team is already playing for next year.
I think the answer to your question is that they realized earlier that with no IP cap, you could get an advantage if you could max out your SP starts each week at 14. It also protected them against “losing” a start when more than 2 SPs were scheduled to pitch on the same day. That would still occur but they would have enough other pitchers to fill in the other days to make sure you got 2 SP starts every day (or as close to as every day as possible).
Keeping the 1500 IP cap would seem to solve this problem. Teams would have to watch their cap and make sure they paced themselves out correctly.
Also, opening up more SP slots would also help because it would lessen the incentive to stockpile SPs beyond normal depth. If you’re able to start your top 5-6 SPs every week regardless of what day they pitch on, it creates less need to have extra SPs on the roster to make up for the lost starts when more than 2 SPs are pitching on the same day.
Kudos to the owners of those 3 teams for recognizing the benefit earlier, but it is resulting in every other position losing value compared to SPs except on the odd week when two of these 3 teams are playing each other.
This makes sense to me. I’d like to see how other leagues are faring.
I think the market can correct a little bit of the problem - it certainly doesn’t seem to stand that teams should be able to afford 14 or 17 SPs in the future.
I also am pretty compelled by the idea that not being able to start more than 2 SPs isn’t fun.
I have all the concerns about IP caps that I mentioned in the previous thread and don’t know if they are a solution for these problems.
With the caveat that this is my first year in Ottoneu and I am still figuring out what I’m doing…
I have concerns with the games-played caps and IP’s caps as it pertains to H2H. Makes all the sense in the world for standard points, but for teams that are in competitve matches every week, they might end the last match-up with no more games to play and be at a severe disadvantage at the end of the regular season. And I guess I’m not super sure if the limits then apply to the post-season? I would hope not. Maybe that’s in the rules somewhere and I haven’t found that tidbit yet.
I know that was one of the main reasons why our league didn’t switch over. Especially early in the season when aces match up against each other. It would suck to have to sit one of your top three pitchers just because the other two are pitching. Seems like an exciting format with a few minor tweaks needed.
League 935 here. All our top teams are also IP leaders. I am leading the league pretty solidly (1st loss last week when I had life get in the way of the starting pitching shuffle). But stockpiling pitching seems to be the way to go. I’ll take a mediocre 15-20 points 2x a day on a so-so pitching performance from a $1-3 pitcher all week long. I rarely have 0 SP and occasionally have 3-5 going on a single day- but usually 2-3 each day. I’m projected to pitch 1838 IP. Top 4 teams are all projected above 1700 IP (1 over 1900). I think I would support an IP limit per week over SP slots, at this point. Anecdotally- the SP market is seeming to thin as teams are catching on. But there seems always (true to life) to be more pitchers to take chances on to get that sweet 7.4 points/inning. Volume will almost always cover the -10 stinker of a start as most truly horrible starts are limited by RL teams pulling the pitcher very quickly due to the rise of bullpen use.
This is the most interesting point to me - scanning H2H leagues, it doesn’t look like the market has fully wrapped its head around how much more SPs are worth in that format than in season-long. Maybe a better way to say it is that it seems like the market (48 hour blind auctions, etc) could adjust to prevent any individual team from getting way more IP than all the other teams. If, of course, the market adjusts.
I’m biased towards hoping this is true because it is a more elegant solution to the IP imbalance than implementing soft inning caps, which I really think would hurt H2H more than help. With a weekly cap, Sunday starts would become more valuable than starts on other days and generally manipulating the cap would become the entire game.
Would love to hear from more of you on all this stuff, of course.
I share your hope of a market correction. Globally it might happen, but in our league i suspect the disparity between the top and bottom drives disengagement in all aspects- but most notably for this discussion: free agent acquisition and, therefore, valuation. Truth be told, we’re a new league to Ottoneu so some disengagement might just be systemic. More data from more leagues is likely needed.
I have 7 healthy starting pitchers and this week 6 of them start on the same day – so with only 2 SP spots I’ll get credit for 2 starts all week out of this 6 pitcher crew. Are we comfortable halfway through the season to declare the 2 SP rule busted? Nothing fun about building a roster of 25 starting pitchers to ensure 2 starts each night.
