The final two category dump I'd like to talk about is the one I've personally had the most success with. It involves dumping wins and saves.
In a league with no IP requirement, this would be as easy as drafting nine injured pitchers and simply making sure you had an ERA and WHIP of 0.00. But this is a strategy that can work quite well with an IP requirement of 900-1,000. Anything higher would make this a difficult road to travel.
Alternatively, this has been called the Maddux strategy or the Pedro strategy. Greg Maddux dominated the National League pitching universe from 1992-1998, and Pedro dominated the American League pitching universe from 1998-2003.
The idea is to spend whatever it takes to get your ace, fill in with two other starters, and then pick up a host of middle relievers. The goal is to spend $60 on your pitching staff, tops. The additional $25 spent on offense (compared to the $175 average per team) should put you at or near the top of all the offensive categories.
The additional benefit is that you probably won't finish last in wins and, if one of your cheap middle relievers gets some saves, you might get some garbage points there as well. Since your ace alone will win 20+ (you hope), you might finish with a handful of points in wins.
In freeze leagues, a decent undervalued starter certainly will help your cause. Last year, I tried a modified version of this in my American League and would have been screwed if I hadn't lucked into a $14 Mike Mussina. Another year I did this, I had a $10 Brad Radke frozen. That sure helped.
But even if you don't have the pitching freezes, you can still try this. The biggest problem with trying it today is that I don't see a Maddux or Pedro out there.
Johan Santana is currently the closest thing to one of those pitchers. But even he "only" earned $46 last year.
In his best season, Maddux earned $72. Pedro earned $78. Those types of earnings make you almost bulletproof and, if you draft only two other starters, you only need $0 earnings from those guys to a) make innings and b) still win ERA/WHIP in a walk. Pedro was so dominant in 2000 that I owned him for only half of the season and still made this strategy work.
A $46 season is nice, but your wiggle room suddenly disappears. I owned Santana last year at $47 and he couldn't quite put me over the top in ERA/WHIP. My draft roster garnered me 21 points in those two categories. Excellent...but not what I was looking for in a year where I had no margin for error.
So you can try the strategy with Santana. It just might not work. One bomb of a starter can sabotage your whole effort much more easily.
The other caveat is obviously injury. If your strategy is relying mostly on one player and that player goes down, you're finished. Furthermore, if you're running a three SP strategy and one of your starters gets hurt, you will have a problem making innings.
Tomorrow, I'll talk a little about allocating auction dollars in a category dump, and what you shouldn't do.
4 comments:
I've been reading your essays for a couple of weeks now. They were so interesting that I went back and read the archives too. This is a very good blog!
In any case, this post is especially helpful because I've been thinking about employing this strategy for 2008.
Generally, my keepers are not very good and my pitchers are especially bad. Does that seem the perfect circumstance to try to minimize pitching costs?
Keep this in mind: in my league, the largest source of draft inflation is the number of cheap closers: Dotel $5, Putz $6, Jenks $8, Papelbon $9, Ray $10, and Street $11. Total: $49.
At LABR, those guys went for $106 -- when the Sox said Papelbon would be a starter.
Incidentally, those 6 retained closers were acquired as relatively cheap middle relievers, so that's another potential perk of this strategy.
One last thanks: Given the poor state of my keepers, and your February 22 post on freeze lists, I'm now likely to keep Hafner at $31, Jeter at $33 and/or Rios at $24.
If you are strong, you can try the $9 pitching staff. I tried it with a very weak freeze list a couple of years ago, and competed until September. Unfortunately, I made one move too many and had a rash of injuries on offense, but it can work.
As one additional comment, Rodger, thanks for coming by and reading - we appreciate you here and look forward to providing more interesting stuff to write about!
Appreciate you sharing your thoughts and strategies so openly. I've learned a lot.
How do your tandem strategies fare in 5x5 leagues? I don't have any 5x5 experience, but both of my leagues are moving to the 5x5 scoring system.
Thanks.
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