Innings Requirements

[sethpoppel]

In a 12 Team NL Only league, the league rules require 1000 ip or the defaulting team(s) wind up with 1 point in ERA and WHIP. This year in our league FOUR teams (one barely) MISSED the innings requirement. Reducing the 4 teams to 1 point each in WHIP and ERA..which does not show up YET in the scoring for the league (without changing the points other teams have in the category) is SUPPOSED to not impact the relative standings of the remaining teams (that is what most leagues say about that rule.) I disagree strongly. Aside from awarding these teams 1 point each in ERA and WHIP, I definitely think it causes even more distortions than that, as several of these adopted a heavy-saves/relief mode to do well in Saves (and perhaps help them in ERA and WHIP if they then bulked up on innings later on)…so it also can unfairly award points in Saves!! Thus I feel that 3 categories are impacted. I also think that the category points should be tallied in a way where after the “failing” teams are awarded their one point in ERA and WHIP (and in the future, perhaps Saves) the rest of the qualifiers should have their points re-ranked based on the new “standings” in the ERA and WHIP category. It DOES make a relative difference (it has always been argued that it makes no difference, but this is not the case.) i.e. Let us say 4 teams fail to qualify in innings in a 12 team league... if Joe (who qualified in innings) was ranked last in ERA, but the 4 “failing teams” are all tied at 1, Joe would move up to 5 points in the category from 1 (and he was deprived of those 4 extra points because of the 4 failing teams.) The person who finished first in the category still gets his 12, so he does not gain any points. Thus Joe would gain 4 points relative to the rest of the teams…and so on for all of the other teams who DID qualify in innings. So you can see there are lots of situations where the standings can change if the “deprived” teams are awarded the points they should rightfully have.

In addition, I think at August 1 (which is what we do for our private roto leagues) an "alert" should be sent out by NFBC to those teams that are tracking for <1000ip to "prod" them into making the changes necessary to qualify or at least an "alert" should go out to ALL teams if it is too difficult for your software to just pull those with less than the "tracking number".

[Ultrarunner]

Rules are clear. Owner’s responsibility to track IP (and validate their FAAB bids, etc). No need for a change.

These strategies are open to everyone. And tanking K and W rarely works well.