They are not, but even with 5 SP slots due to the 1500 IP cap, no season-long points team is on pace to throw 1900 IP. I believe the top H2H teams are on that pace. I don’t think the point difference can be attributed to “missing” points on the bench, because of the sheer number of innings should outweigh missing a good start here or there. As an aside, I’m pretty satisfied with @vibbot’s thoughts on this delta.
This dovetails with what @ballnglove82 mentioned in his last post and I generally agree with - missing starts is anecdotal and not as big of an issue in terms of success or failure in H2H. However, it is undeniably frustrating to lose out on a pitching start because of the 2 SP slots in H2H - it may only happen 2 or 3 times over the course of the year and it may not really affect wins or losses, but it will be what you remember. In conjunction with having to pick up lousy pitchers just to get to 14 starts in a week, navigating your 14 starts per week cap feels bad since you cannot pick on what days to use those starts up and you’re throwing pitchers you don’t want to throw at the expense of throwing pitchers you do want to throw. Again, that probably isn’t actually the case, but I can understand if it does feel that way.
A few other thoughts:
This is a good diagnosis but I don’t agree with the solution. A small percentage of RPs crack the top 200 scoring pitchers because a small percentage of RPs are being used enough. RPs produce a higher P/IP than SPs, they just don’t pitch enough innings. The way to compensate for this is probably along the lines of what @dcrowell brought up pre-season: adding another RP slot to mimic the higher percentage of RP innings compared to SP innings. The goal is to have your RPs in total be able to score 35%-45% of your pitching points, and the best way to do that is to add more room to play RPs.
This is a good counterpoint to what I wrote up-thread, and overall I’m definitely leaning towards implementing a weekly start cap, though I’ll need to dig in to that code before I make any promises.
This may be blasphemy, but I’ve learned a bit about this from Ottoneu Fantasy Football. Freezing player adds for the last month of the season is important because teams that aren’t in the playoffs can cut their high-priced superstars and end up having an outsized effect on the playoffs. So while there are a number of checks in place to help mitigate streaming or huge roster turnover in September, I think it makes more sense to celebrate the playoffs that month and not let the 6-8 teams that didn’t make the playoffs cause upheaval by cutting grossly overpriced guys they have no intention of keeping. Bryce Harper may play that role this season, for example.
Right now, I’m leaning towards not allowing auctions during the playoffs (in all leagues with playoffs) and working on a weekly starts cap for H2H in 2019.