Auto Benching SP with GS caps

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that when the SP slots were being reduced near the end of the week that the system would bench pitchers that had just recently pitched? I’m seeing that it is benching players that are starting that day. Is this a bug or do I have to login every single morning to check my SP are correct after the slots are reduced?

There is no auto-benching for pitchers, and you need to actively remove pitchers from your starting lineup if your H2H cap is under 5.

There definitely is auto benching of some sort. If I leave 5 SP in those slots and come back the next day when the limit is now at 4, one of the pitchers is automatically benched. Is there an algorithm to determine which one gets benched or is it random?

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Right, so that is not “auto-benching if not starting” per the auto-benching option on the lineup page. That is just there aren’t enough slots for your pitchers in your lineup and the site randomly removes one because it has to.

I understand its not part of your auto-benching feature for batters, but I’m not sure what else I would have called it.

I thought you were working on an algorithm a while back so that the pitcher that gets removed is the one who most recently pitched?

Yeah, just clarifying that the site, per your guess, is picking a pitcher at random, not using any logic like the auto-benching site feature uses for hitters.

I have no recollection of talking about considering who pitched recently or anything like that. My assumption (and thus how the site works) is that the GS cap requires managing so people will mostly actively manage their in-lineup SP.

My recommendation for anyone in H2H leagues with GS caps is to actively keep pitchers on your bench except for the days they are pitching and you want their stats.

I appreciate your recommendation, but I typically set my pitchers on friday and don’t log back in until Monday morning.

Any thoughts on re-exploring this?

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Good memory, totally forgot I wrote that. I’ll consider it, though I’m hesitant to add more logic there that may backfire in specific situations.

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We all have faith in your ability to implement more logic and bend the code to your will.

Should I add this to the wishlist forum?

Until that time I will manually remove SP as they complete their projected starts to avoid the wrong pitcher being removed. There is also a risk to this as sometimes starts or games get pushed back a day.

This does not need to be added to the wishlist forum as of now.

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So your suggesting a feature that allows you to not manage your team, and you’d like it to be an option for everyone?

This is a terrible suggestion, if you don’t like managing a fantasy baseball team, don’t play fantasy baseball. If you want to check your team once a week, play ESPN. Fantasy managers that make site suggestions to cheapen a product, just to fit their play style are the worst. Really they are just a bunch of redundancies who want everything to gravitate towards a mean they are familiar with…

The change that allowed limiting GS in H2H was bad enough (it created an uneven playing field and limited player pool). Suggestions like this shouldn’t be considered.

Keep Ottoneu Deep.

Good morning to you too.

I don’t believe that the suggestion is cheapening the site. In my point of view it is a shortcoming of the way the site manages the team for you. I don’t see how this could be considered managing my team for me. I set the rotation and the system will randomly wreck it overnight. So just because I can’t log on to the site just to fix the system from breaking the lineup that I set already on a saturday morning before the first game on the east coast starts up that makes me the worst kind of manager? lol. ok. I’d say logging in to a site 5 to 6 days a week to play a game, that I pay to play, with no prizes, should be sufficient enough.

If you don’t like GS in H2H then don’t play that format. Fortunately this site has many styles of play to choose from, and if you’re not going to play GS cap format then there is no need to chime in on other peoples suggested format changes. After all, it is merely a suggestion, there is no need to attack the poster for bringing up something the founder himself mentioned he would look into, which I happen to think would be a positive change. Sorry for trying to ruin your game.

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Generally I tend to agree with @Leif here about particularly this request. It feels a bit like asking the site to do something you would do yourself if you had time to do it. I disagree with Leif in that I think it is ok you don’t want to put aside a bit of time on a Sunday morning to make sure the right SP is benched, but I think it is also ok that the trade off is the site uses literally no logic and picks functionally at random. This is mostly an ok trade-off to me because setting a rotation (unlike hitting lineups) takes significantly less time to manage.

I also worry about some future case where some team (the Rays, let’s be honest) decide to use an Opener on Friday and again on Sunday, or some case where a scheduled starting pitcher had to come in relief or something. Setting a rotation takes very little time out of the day when done by a human, but a computer doing it for you could have all kinds of caveats that could cause problems. Introducing complicated logic, or any logic at all, is setting off alarms in my head about all the ways it could go wrong. It also would slow down various parts of the site (more data look ups) and there’s no guarantee that it would work right. Finally, if I’m understanding this correctly, it is a pretty specific situation where this would occur - same number of SP going on the weekend as you have GS remaining, multiple on Sunday, one of the ones going Sunday gets benched instead of the guy who pitched Saturday - pretty specific and takes 2 button clicks on the lineup page to resolve (unless one of them is Ohtani, I suppose).

The SP caps have been in place for 2 years now and I’ve had a couple of people email me about their SP being benched and not knowing why, but every time we figured out it was because the shrinking number of SP slots it was then easily managed. I really think this is best managed by a human and not by some logic that I’d have to write and maintain, and so I really do not think there is going to be a change on this front any time soon.

@bryannutbrown if you want to create a wishlist item and see if there are some other people interested in this change, I encourage it.

@Leif I appreciate the enthusiasm but let’s try to stay civil and focus on the merits of the actual suggestion when talking about people’s site suggestions. I’m trying to keep an open mind and be empathetic on the reason someone would bother to come to the forums and engage with me about something that is annoying them on the site and I hope everyone else would do the same.

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I just want to note I am definitely interested in this request. Playing 10 team h2h, the last two weeks I have had my Sunday starter benched because of the way this works. E.g. today I lost a Rodon start. He was in the SP slot, and now he’s not. Morton, who started yesterday, locked in my one remaining SP slot, eliminating the spot Rodon was in. (Because when I scheduled Rodon, I had more than 1 SP slot remaining.)

This is especially rough on West Coast players who wake up and find there’s nothing they can do. Definitely in this case I think I could have switched it last night if I’d remembered, but I think there are better fixes.

There are three fixes I see that stay true to the spirit outlined above. Of course there may be more, and of course maybe my concerns are not widespread, etc.

  1. Autobench starting pitchers who are not actually starting that day.
  2. A UX fix that restricts the available SP slots based on how many SP slots you have scheduled. So in a 10 GS league, if you’ve already scheduled 7 GS, you would only have 3 GS slots available. (Right now the system is if you’ve already used 7 GS. This is a totally reasonable way to do it, but causes issues in the scenario described.)
  3. A UX fix that makes it clear that it is stupid to leave starting pitchers in the SP slot when they are not actually starting – this is only a problem in due to lock/autobench dynamics. For example, defaulting starting pitchers to bench, rather than a persistent state (wherever this pitcher was left yesterday is where they will appear today).

What about just leaving it at 5 slots until the 10th SP starts his game and then autobench the rest at that point? Would that work?

Generally it is not helpful to suggest actual solutions without knowing the complexity of the code and systems involved.

I hear you guys that you want more predictable benching of SP when you have too many for how many slots you have remaining. I’m not convinced that “check your lineup at 9am PT on a Sunday” is a huge burden but I’ll look into it.