Many rotisserie-scoring baseball leagues, especially in the 4×4 format, use an innings requirement. To discourage reliever-only strategies, which can make it easier to post low ERA and WHIP numbers, teams must reach a given number of innings (based on roster size) to qualify for points in those categories at the end of the season.
Usually the penalty for failing to meet the innings requirement is either last place in the percentage categories, or only one point in the standings irrespective of the actual ERA/WHIP the team accumulates.
But what is the point of the innings requirement? We want fantasy baseball to be more like real baseball. In real baseball, you can’t just use all relievers: somebody has to start each game, and each game is 9 innings. Without an innings requirement, you could do very well in ERA and WHIP by having no starters, or just a few elite starters, using relievers (who tend to post somewhat better averages) for the bulk of your staff. Sure, you don’t do well in wins, but you likely do very well in saves, ERA, and WHIP. In 5×5 leagues, the cumulative category strikeouts makes an innings requirement mostly unnecessary (going all relievers would be giving up in 2 categories), but in 4×4 leagues it makes sense.
Making someone finish last in the categories is overkill. If you don’t have enough innings, then wouldn’t it be better to “reward” your team with those innings, but from bad pitchers? So that’s what we did. I’ve been in two 4×4 leagues for over 20 years, and a few years back we adopted the idea of a “penalty pitcher”. We use 10 pitchers, and have a 1300 inning requirement. So we decided that if you didn’t make the innings requirement, you’d get extra innings added to your total – first to get to 1300, then an extra 50 innings to encourage you to actually beat it and not just come close. Since you didn’t pick a starter your self, we automatically pick one for you, and it’s the worst one in the league. Well, we find the worst pitcher with at least 130 innings pitched (because you’d need to average 130 innings per pitcher to make our innings requirement of 1300), and we add extra innings, earned runs, hits, and walks, at the rate of that pitcher. You don’t get credit for any wins, but you absorb quite a few bad outings. And I determine which pitcher separately for each category.
In the Park Slope Rotisserie League this year, two teams failed to reach the innings requirement. The worst pitcher in ERA with over 130 innings was John Lackey, who had a 6.41 ERA in 160 innings, while the worst WHIP pitcher was Tyler Chatwood, who had a 1.669 WHIP in 142 innings. So the penalized teams had earned runs added at Lackey’s rates, and hits/walks added at Chatwood’s rate, to their totals.
The league’s final standings show two values in the ERA and WHIP columns for each of the two teams, Team Joker and The Empire, that missed 1300 innings. The number in italics, followed by an asterisk, is the adjusted ERA and WHIP, including the penalty. That number is used to rank the teams in those categories, and is the sort order. The unadjusted cumulative values are shown in the column with the teams that made the innings requirement. Team Joker barely missed, finishing with 1297.67 innings, while The Empire had 1286.67. So the italic value was computed by adding 52.33 innings to Team Joker, and 63.33 to The Empire.
During the season, RotoValue prorates the innings requirement based on the number of games played. When you’re showing standings for more than 20% of the games in the season, it checks team innings totals against the prorated requirement, and applies a prorated penalty to any teams not on pace to meet the full season minimum.
I like the “penalty pitcher” solution to an innings requirement, because the punishment fits the crime. If you don’t pitch enough innings, your team absorbs enough bad innings to get to a reasonable total. The closer you come to the requirement, the less impact the penalty has. But the penalty innings are tied to actual performance of a pitcher in the relevant league, so it approximates replacement level.
RotoValue supports three other penalties for missing an innings requirement: one point, zero points, or last place in the category (when multiple teams fail to reach the requirement, they’d all tie, but have more than one point). But I think the penalty innings approach is better, as it simulates what a real baseball team would have to do: use bad pitching if it can’t find someone better to start.
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