I’ve always had more time than dollars to invest in fantasy, but this is why I’ve decided to continue to give you my money for coming up on four years. I’ve seen how you listen to feedback and continue to develop the game, and it has become an incredible service for fantasy baseball (and I assume also football… but it’s just not my thing).
I know ottoneu will only continue to get better- so, thank you again @nivshah! This was some great Holiday news to see in my inbox today
For this H2H points format. Are you considering removing the 1500 innings cap for the season?
I am worried about callups and streaming late in the season being a factor that tips over the scales for those who have stashed prospects that will debut.
For example, in my work league we have 10 starts per week, and a minimum of 25 innings. If you don’t hit 25 innings your pitching points don’t count…if you go over 10 starts before Sunday, points scored after that don’t count. But you can start as many pitchers as you want on Sunday if you are under.
Is something like that what you have in mind?
Are you also considering a cap on guys acquired per match? I am afraid of guys getting pitchers to stream just for the points.
Well I think 48-hour auctions that everyone can bid on should tamp down on that a bit, at least as a repeatable exploit. And I think reducing the number of SP slots on the lineup page to a number like 3 (instead of 5) would help, as would making a soft per-matchup innings cap of about 60 IP. So, I guess that’s a summation of my current thinking on preventing pitcher streaming from taking over this game mode.
In a $50 or $100 league, the #1 seed could have a 300 point lead on Sept 1 and wind up with zilch because he lost in the playoffs unless there was some proviso for both a regular season and playoff prize pool.
This is a good point and worth considering. I think this is the risk one takes on by choosing to have playoffs. I also have absolutely no problem with leagues paying the base fee and doing prizes on their own.
I’m surprised to hear that limiting the pitcher slots to 2 or 3 works well. Aren’t there a lot of weeks where your pitcher starts all line up on the same day? If 4 or 5 of your best pitchers just happen to pitch the same day and you can only start 2 or 3 of them, that’s a lot of points you would miss out on.
In a league that plays FG Pts until September and then has playoffs, can I presume the 1500 IP cap has to be reduced to something like 1250 to account for the regular season ending early?
Instead of limited slots or IP limits just go with 6 starts. That way if my SPs go deeper into games I’d benefit from that and there would be choice involved in picking my 6 starts. 60 IP could be all of a team’s starts (not a lot of choice) and also negates the IP category if everyone gets 60. I use 6 starts in my other leagues and it is a lot of funny deciding your 6 starts.
I think a starts cap is a good idea. With a 40 man roster, teams could just load up on mediocre $1-$3 starters and just throw them out there each week. Imagine team with 18-20 starting pitchers. The H2H league I just moved over to Ottoneu, from CBS, had a 9 SP (of 25) limit per team on the active roster. MiLB and DL didn’t count. I would say more like 10-12 per starts per week is a good place to start the discussion.
I’m surprised to hear that limiting the pitcher slots to 2 or 3 works well. Aren’t there a lot of weeks where your pitcher starts all line up on the same day? If 4 or 5 of your best pitchers just happen to pitch the same day and you can only start 2 or 3 of them, that’s a lot of points you would miss out on.
Sorry I’m late on this reply.
It isn’t a perfect solution but it works to automatically limit the Pitching side so that the Hitting side doesn’t get overrun by a pitching-heavy roster strategy.
The problem with 4 or 5 active SP slots comes when teams stock their roster with an abundance of SP’s in order to push the soft IP or GS cap as much as possible for every matchup. My experience with leagues that are set this way is that they always ultimately skew towards pitching, even to the point where some owners won’t even roster enough Hitters to cover all of their active Hitting slots because the 20 or so points per week you’d get from a Batter doesn’t match up to the extra 100+ points you could snag from the extra IP or GS over the limit when you start those 4 extra players on that final matchup day.
Limiting it to 2 active SP slots forces every owner to manage an actual rotation and gives the league a natural cap on SP’s for a more level playing field, which is important if you believe owners should be able to build their teams around offense as well as around pitching. Sometimes you do have 4 or 5 good arms lined up to start on the same day- which can suck- but, considering the alternative, it certainly sucks more to be the teams that get bulldozed every week by the soft cap when there are no more decent arms left in the FA pool because those owners were late to the party.
To frame it another way, I believe that the points lost by not being able to start more than 2 SP’s each day are not nearly as meaningful to the league or to a random matchup as are the extra points that are gained from starting 2 or 3 or 4 extra arms for each matchup over the course of a full season.
If anyone would like to follow the leagues I run on Yahoo that do this, drop me a DM. I’ve seen many owners with reservations like yours come around to enjoying (if not preferring) the 2 active SP limit after they’ve played it out and seen how the alternative can really skew a league.
I agree 6 starts is too low but 10-12 is basically all of your starts and I think it is more fun to have to choose which starts from your team you want. You’re still going to choose most of them but it adds an element of choice in setting your lineup rather than just blindly putting all SP in. Most teams in my Otto league carried about 9 big league pitchers on avg. If the number of SPs is 9 then teams would have 9-18 possible starts per week but rarely if ever would it be 18. I would say on avg it would be 12 so i think 8 starts is best or 9 at the most.
2 SPs per day maxes out at 14 starts per week. I’d prefer a 12 total start max and allow teams to choose how to use those starts. If I have 4 guys going on the same day I shouldn’t be penalized.
I do agree that there NEEDS to be a cap. Prior to the 9 SP limit I mentioned, the “better” teams would load up on starters and roster the absolute minimum amount of hitters.
2 SP’s max out at 14 for the week, but that’s only if it’s worth carrying the extra arms to give you the 14 starts. For the most part, you’re not able to reach that number because of the varying days SP’s will start. So you are not only choosing which players to start (if more than two are starting) but you’re also trying to decide where that balance is between carrying an extra SP or two instead of another bat or prospect.
I agree that 12 GS per week is a good number; I’ve used that limit in an ESPN league, although it was 10 teams and I had to have 15 active hitting slots to help balance out the pitching. Scaled to a 12-team league, that works out to between 12 and 13 hitters which is what Niv has designed here (edit: I should mention that I always prefer to use the original FIP-based scoring formula for Pitchers, as I think it’s a better balance to the Hitting formula, and I also adjust the RP categories in order to reflect a natural 2/3’s SP-to-1/3 RP points output, which is generally MLB’s usage of the two roles in terms of IP). That league had 3 SP slots + 1 P slot (+ 5 RP’s), and of course it was a soft limit so owners could get up to 15 GS, or more if they had a SP/RP player.
I had success in that league using a “penalty” system for going over the limit, which was taking the number of GS over the limit multiplied by the score of their highest scoring player for that week and deducting that number from the team’s Season Total Points tally, but the W/L result of the matchup still stood. That made the soft GS cap play towards the competitive aspect of the league, as most of the end of season payouts were based on the season Total Points Standings (including Playoffs). Needless to say things got interesting by the end of the year, especially when a non-playoff club in the consolation bracket would actually get paid more because a playoff team penalized themselves so much that they were knocked down to finish below them in Total Points.
I think I’m living in a vacuum for this discussion. I’m running a 16 team league where EVERYONE loads up on starting pitching to gain an edge…and that was with categories. Now moving over to Ottoneu with a points scoring system, I think it will get worse. We had 30 roster spots, 10 hitters, 5 Relievers, 6 starters, 3 Minors and 6 bench. DL was separate as well but you couldn’t stash.
Now with 40 roster spots and only 17 required to be filled specifically (12 hitters, 5 RP) I think teams will load up on as many starters as possible. I found in my 12 team Ottoneu FG Pts league that getting to 1500 requires roughly 1200 IP from starters. That makes you run out a rotation of 6-9, depending on health. The 10 day DL has affected that but its another discussion. In a H2H environment I think a hard “Start cap” per scoring period is the best method. I came up with 12 starts per scoring period figuring a 9 man rotation with each guy looking at 1 start per week and a few getting two. Maybe 10 would be better? I’m just not a fan of limiting starts per day.
I’m still tracking this conversation, and I’m still leaning towards a soft 60 IP cap. I think cap restrictions and 48-hour blind auctions are going to mitigate the ‘streaming pitchers’ concern in a big way, or at least give it more of a cost than a traditional league would have. I’d like to see how a season of H2H plays out in practice before over-correcting against streaming pitchers based on leagues that don’t have cap penalties, hard caps, 48 hour auctions, etc.
This is all really interesting stuff! Thanks to everyone who has shared their H2H experiences so far.
