Monday, March 8, 2010

Relief Pitchers

I wonder if Relief Pitchers are more valuable in this league than my others. Its weekly and you HAVE to start 4 RP. With 12 teams, that means 48 RP starting every week. Are there 48 trustworthy RP? I suppose, but only 30 are getting saves and set up guys can sometimes hurt as much as help.
It would be an interesting strategy to punt saves and start 4 DL'ed relief pitchers each week, just to keep them from hurting your ratios. We have a 30 IP minimum though, so you'd have to be sure you had enough starts.

We always here this mantra from ESPN: Don't Pay For Saves
I think that makes more sense in a roto league, where you have a thousand innings, so the occasional reliever meltdown wont' really hurt you and 60 innings with an ERA of 4.10 isn't the end of the world. But in a Head-To-Head league, where one bad closer blowup can cost you ERA and WHIP for the week, maybe it's different. I haven't done nor will I do any real research on this, but I do wonder about it.
Good RP do tend to come out of the woodwork each year. If you picked up Aardsma, Franklin, Rodney and Nunez last year, you could have won saves. Or you could have drafted Kevin Gregg like an idiot and watched him throat-fuck your ratios on a near weekly basis with classic walk-single-HBP-walk-HR outings that send you off to the gym for misguided and unspotted self-punishment.

Either way.

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