Ottoneu IP "Soft" Cap

Just a quick reminder to @everyone that might new to the game: the 1,500 IP cap is “soft”, which means you can actually exceed it, which is important to know if you’re in a tight race.

Here’s the official rule:

The innings maximum is a soft cap, meaning on the day a team goes over the 1500 IP limit, all the pitchers played that day will receive credit.

This essentially means that if you pitch 1,499 IP and have 4 SP lined up to start on your “last” day of the season (the day you cross 1,500), you could hit 1,523 IP total if all four pitch 6 IP (not including your bullpen).

Related to the above, there were 1,130 FGPTS teams last season, and 256 had more than 1,500 IP. The highest was 1,531, and the average IP of all league winners last year was 1,498.

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Am I to interpret that to mean that if I hit 1,500 IP on the second of the last day of the season, I can still accumulate innings on the last day of the season?

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No. You will get all innings pitched on the day you hit 1500 IP, even if that means going over 1500 IP. This is how Yahoo handles their innings limit, for example.

Any day after you hit (or exceed) 1500 IP, your team will not get credit for any innings pitched.

So are the Games Played limits handled differently than the Innings Pitched limits? Meaning, there is a team in one of my leagues that has 164 games played at Catcher. The only conceivable way he could have done that was to hit 162 (the limit) and then played two more Catcher games. Trey was very careful to say “1,499” in his example, leading me to believe as long as one didn’t exceed 1,500, they could still accumulate Innings. What am I missing?!

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So ‘games played > games cap’ enables the cap, but ‘innings pitched >= innings cap’ enables the pitching cap?

As a first-year Ottoneu manager, I’d like to throw in my two cents on this soft cap business: I don’t really like it. One of the things I love of ON is how it gets away from the streaming and free-agent add / dump mentality, but here we are at the end of a tremendous season of having to strategize and think longer-term and there’s this rush to add a whole bunch of pitchers you wouldn’t normally ever think of adding for one start on the day of exceeding the cap. It really doesn’t feel consistent with how the rest of the season is played or very organic to Ottoneu. All of a sudden there’s this very contrived business of calculating out the day you might go over the cap, starting auctions for possible starters on those days, and some mad rush that seems not very tied into the type of strategy that rules the rest of the year. I’d much prefer that when you hit the 1500 innings, that’s it, middle of the day or not.

But that’s my only complaint – I’ve loved the game and season overall.

Saying any day you “hit” 1,500 you reach the cap is not how the rule actually reads, since it states:

“…meaning on the day a team goes over the 1500 IP limit, all the pitchers played that day will receive credit.”

I hit exactly 1,500 exactly today. The way the rule is written implies any IP I throw tomorrow would count, correct?

I know this question gets asked a lot but I’ve never actually hit exactly 1,500 before with one day to go…

I recognize hitting exactly 1,500 probably locks the cap (intent), I guess looking at it now that I’ve done it for the first time, I’d argue the rule actually suggests otherwise.

Pretty specific circumstance, so I did a code dive. Looks like you should get some pitching stats tomorrow, as long as you don’t change pitching lineups. It’s a really similar (complicated) check to the game cap, and I’ll be cleaning all that up in the offseason.

I’m gunning for 1531. Is that the record?

https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/513/standings

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Thank you.

@JC1 not sure what the record is but 1,531 is impressive and has to be close

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To confirm for 2017, was this addressed this year? If a team hits exactly 1,500 IP prior to the last day, will they receive points for all IP above 1,500 on the final day? That is what happened to me last year and the points (and IP) were counted, which seems contrary to the spirit of the soft cap rule.

Yes, this was addressed. If you hit exactly 1500 IP, you will be considered at the innings limit and won’t get stats going forward. Did a code dive again just to make sure!

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