I’m seeing a start per week cap rather than season or weekly IP. Right now there are 14 starts per week available to each team @ 2 per day.
A weekly Starts limit would allow for as many SPs to start in one day as a team needs (@millercharley) until the weekly cap is hit.
The cap could be lowered to 12(?) starts per week to limit the need to stock so many SP’s.
Agree, this is the rule Ottoneu should adopt. Team gets 7 SP per week max — one for each day of the week like MLB. You can use them all on Monday if you want.
2 Likes
@millercharley I’m more inclined to have a higher amount of starts per week cap limit. A balance might be found from the number(40) of roster spots we have. Even with only 7 I feel teams will want to roster many SP on the bench aligning the best matchups to utilize toward the cap.
I wonder what the average number of starts per week teams are actively rostering an SP currently. To throw out a guess…9.5ish St/WK.
Don’t take the GS cap too literally. If each team drafts 12 SPs, there will be bidding wars whenever the other 6 MLB SPs have a start that falls on a Fri/Sat/Sun. Remember that with 7 GS cap, many teams will aim to get as close to 11 GS per week as they can (using up 6 GS before the day when they can line up their maximum SPs at once, to take advantage of the soft cap). Cap limits will somewhat restrict this strategy, but extreme strategies will be rewarded (e.g., load up on 15 cheap SPs and stream a few stragglers at $5 each with all the extra budget you have, so you always have close to 5 SPs starting on your soft cap day.)
I see your point. I would advocate for no soft cap. If more starting pitchers are actively rostered than the remaining St/WK are avial, then no starts count that day, or some other mechanism to enforce a hard cap.
I agree, you have to have 12-14 games started if you want to win your matchup most weeks. A lot of matchups are decided by the luck of whose starters are bunched together instead of who pitches better.
I like the idea of 4SP slots, hard cap of 10 games started. The first 10 games started counts, so if your tenth start is a noon game Sunday and you have the Sunday night starter going as well his innings don’t count.
Right now the leaders in my second year league are jettisoning prospects, young guys and bench players for fringe SP’s to try to get two starts every day.
3 Likes
Read through this a while back so I may be mentioning what others have brought up about the gameplay in H2H. This is my first year in an Ottoneu league and absolutely love the site and believe this is the future of fantasy. What it truly comes down to is not getting screwed having a day where all your guys go on one day. Also, if that day where all your pitchers go is planted in the middle of the week, you are most likely just getting one start from that group of guys. It truly is all about the placement and the forecaster for that given week. You are seeing more and more teams realize that you need all the starters you can get and the market for pitchers is flooding. This year is a bit different where it was indeed the first year for this H2H format and the teams who realized that starters matter are dominating. Next season will be different, because off season articles will be available about the strategy of such format and teams will draft with that mindset of having a surplus of starters. One strategy for drafts you will see is teams snagging pitchers on the same team (MLB team) so the percentage of being stuck with all your starters going on the same day will decrease. But once everyone realizes that a team needs to have a few bench bats and a bunch of starters, the team to win each week will not be won by “the best team” but the team to have more IP and not being stuck with multiple starters going.
I am in a Ottoneu head to head fantasy baseball league and I think for 2019 a change has to be made for SP. One guy in the league has 15 plus sp and with no league cap on innings it would seem to create an unfair advantage. I understand the 2 Sp per day but I think a team can gain an advantage by filling all bench spots with Sp due to the fact of no innings cap. Give the guy credit for using 15 plus sp to his advantage but I would think a change has to be made in 2019 as far as an innings cap. Any thoughts Sp in the head to head format…
1900 innings by June 14 is crazy!!! I can see everyone is on the same page to just sell out and grab as much Sp as u can. I dont think that makes for the great competitive fantasy league and as much as I love this site for roto and points why would u stay and play on this platform with this kind of problem. I will be checking the posts to see if Niv comes up with a solution. We are already talking about next year. I hope a solution is in place by the end of Aug. My vote is for a 1500 ip cap.like in roto and points. If u want to burn thu your pitching u wont have any sp for the playoffs. I understand its not an easy fix.
I believe the 1900IP is projected for end of the year, not the current IP for any team. Just to clarify.
How much do SPs go for in 48-hour auctions for those of you who have teams with a huge IP lead right now? A few links to auction results would be handy.
What I am starting to see is teams start to give up what they can to add starting pitching in trades. I think that if this isn’t fixed next year draft with mainly focus on SP. I know if I were to play I would draft as many as I could and fill all my bench spots with SP to gain an advantage. I am a big fan of what u have going on here just my opinion on a fix I think has to be made.
1 Like
Well, to your point, I think there will be a big correction in SP prices in the pre-season auction next season. If SP prices go up to match their value in H2H, then SPs will be distributed among teams more evenly.
Right now my thinking is to see how that goes and maybe open up a 3rd SP slot, because missing starts is not very fun. Allow the market to do most of the heavy lifting, etc. Limits, since they by their nature have to be ‘soft’ to an extent, don’t work as well in the H2H format.
No decisions have been made for next season regarding SP yet, so please keep this conversation going!
1 Like
Auction results for SP range from $2-5, I’d say. The auction market isn’t hot an heavy any more. I don’t turn over many SP any more unless one is really tanking (I have 13 rostered). But, as I mentioned before, a tank here or there isn’t really detrimental if you can squeeze out 1 or 2 20-point starts a day. I generally just keep a suspect pitcher as there are plenty of days when I’ll have 3 or more ready to start (and I can just sit the shaky SP).
In our league there is some disengagement at the bottom. 3 teams have pretty much checked out, so, while they could adjust to roster more SP, they haven’t. The top 4 teams or so have constructed similar to me, so there isn’t much movement anymore in the market. Doesn’t make much sense to drop a $2-3 player for a different backbench SP, given the $1-2 penalty. I’ve got 3 high $ marquee drafted SP, but everyone else is $1-3.
While I agree that next year’s auction will see a greater focus on SP, hopefully driving up the cost of rostering a ton of them, I suspect my strategy will be to stay out of the drafting of SP (except 1 or 2 aces) as the SP player field is SO large and mercurial. The bottom line is this: you really don’t need strong SP, just a large number of mediocre pitchers. I think this is because, unlike hitting stats, the pitching stats and performances are so variable. The question is really: do you want to reward players who snag aces over quantity, or should we all just be chasing those sweet, sweet IP points. The weight of 7.4 points/inning pitched suggests quantity over quality is the way to go. And results seem to bear this out in my league (where the top 3 teams check in globally at 4, 12, and 48, respectively).
I’m definitely for a cap next year. I think I lean towards max starts per week over a IP cap, because I like the strategy and hate the idea of cheating a Soft Cap on Sunday. But it is hard to “see it” with out trying it.
Yeah, the max starts cap brought up earlier was very intriguing. I’m working through how to make that cap as hard as possible, but since a slate of games usually start around the same time on Sunday, it’ll still be exploitable, though not as much as an IP cap.
A much better solution than an IP cap, and more aligned with H2H gameplay for sure.
2 Likes
Could the “position lock” function be utilized in a weekly manner? On the daily lineups page could be a separate box for SP with “X” amount of slots, say 10 (the number of St/Wk allowed). Each time an SP is rostered in one of those slots and pitches, the slot is locked out for the week. Could this work to implement a Hard Cap on Starts per Week?
The number of St/Wk could be adjusted when weekly periods are longer than 7 days as we just had with the A.S break.
If there were no changes to the game next season other than a 3rd SP slot, how do you all think the SP market would change in preseason auction?
The comment from @Dahdscear makes it sound like despite all this consternation, the SP market really hasn’t reacted to the reality of the inflated value of SPs in H2H. The big correction should come in February/March, I’d expect. Thoughts?
This is my first year in Otteneu, I joined a new FGPTS league and new H@H league, so I haven’t experienced an off season market adjustment period. I can assume that the Market would adjust to the value of the SP and our rosters would reflect this next year. However, in the weekly gameplay, I sense that adding the 3rd daily SP slot could muddy the waters more. A team with more pitchers lined up with 2 starts could have even more of an advantage over a team with fewer SPs lined up for starts. This is occurring now I feel. Having a St/Wk limit could make the weekly matchups less influenced by this. There would be less scurrying on the FA market for weak 2 start SPs, especially once the playoffs arrive.
Having a Hard Cap on St/Wk could work to make the weekly matchups more even this way.
I don’t feel the issue is one of market adjustment and misperceived value of SPs at the beginning of the season. It right now is one of how many SPs slots can a manager fill up weekly. I have scored the most points overall in my H2H league yet I am 9-6 due to this, It wasn’t manager error on my part, and some of those losses I just lost to the better team that week, but the other losses were due to SPs lining up better for the other team. I’m not referring to the problem of 4-5 starters on one day, but what “quality” of pitcher lines up for 2 starts. If the other teams has 3-4 of their top SPs line-up for 2 starts, and my teams top SPs only line up for 1 start, there is a disadvantage. This disadvantage is also driving the FA scramble for replacement level FA SPs to fill in and attempt to compete. I don’t think adding a 3rd SP slot will correct this issue. Inevitably wouldn’t there will still be unbalanced weekly matchups due to amount of SP starts each team can roster over the period.
I think some of the teams are just seeing what an advantage having a deep staff would bring during the year. I think the correction is taking place right now and current team owners are trading for sp because of the value it brings in having 15 plus Sp. The format u have in points and Roto is great because you have to keep a balance in both price and positions and it makes everything very competitive. Right now in head to head I think u will start seeing a sell off of minors and position players in trades to gain the advantage SP brings. Its clearly an advantage.
1 Like
I don’t play HTH but am considering it for next year and have a question. If it is such an advantage to stack your roster with SP and get potentially 14 starts a week, why are the points totals so much lower than non-HTH leagues.
As of games of July 26:
For example, the 50th highest FGPts team has 12782 which would place him 8th in HTH. There are 3 teams in HTH with 13000+ while in FGPts there are 20 teams. So what am I not understanding as to why so many think it is such an advantage to have as many as 15 SPs.
PS. I understand there are many more non-HTH leagues/teams, but just comparing top 10 scores in each category displays a large delta.
1 Like