Hitting/Pitching Splits in Execution

Back in April, sas4 talked about how his league uses an 80/20 split in favor of hitters. This translates to a $208/$52 split in a league with a $260 auction budget.

This goes against the more "traditional" 67/33 hitter/pitcher split that most Roto publications and web sites recommend. I thought I'd take a look back at my league and see how each team split its money and what the results were. In particular, I want to see if spending less on pitching works to anyone's particular advantage.

Team H: $192/$68. Auction Result: 2nd (out of 12 teams). Offense - 27 points (6th). Pitching - 42 points (1st).
Froze: Roy Halladay $28, A.J. Burnett $20, Dan Haren $14, Gustavo Chacin $1, J.J. Putz $1. Bought: Casey Janssen $1, Matt Clement $1, Scott Proctor $1, Luis Vizcaino $1.

Almost all of Team H's value was built on its freezes, with only Janssen providing significant value in the auction. Typically, the team that avoids negative earnings from its pitchers has the greatest success, and that's the case here; even truncated seasons from Halladay and Burnett help in ERA/WHIP. Putz's $49 season not only gave H eight saves points, but provided $19 of ERA/WHIP value...or the same as C.C. Sabathia in a mere 71 2/3 IP. Notice that spreading a little more money to offense doesn't necessarily guarantee success.

Team F: $172/$87. 4th. Offense - 24.5 points (7th). Pitching - 36 points (2nd, tie).
Froze: Justin Duchscherer $2, Zack Greinke $1, Jon Papelbon $12, C.C. Sabathia $17, Huston Street $11. Bought: Daisuke Matsuzaka $40, Joel Pineiro $2, Kameron Loe $1, Jeff Karstens $1.

Sabathia and Papelbon brought back incredible profits, and even D-Mat's disappointing $13 season couldn't completely torpedo Team F. Despite the fact that F only had two sure starting pitchers in Sabathia and Matsuzaka, it still logged 877 innings from this bunch and grabbed eight wins points. Keep this in mind if you're playing in a 900-1,000 IP limit league...you can get much closer to 1,000 innings coming out of the gate with only two starting pitchers than you would think.

Team I: $174/$85. 6th. Offense - 21 points (9th). Pitching - 36 points (2nd, tie).
Froze: John Lackey $15, Chris Ray $10, Scot Shields $10, Jarrod Washburn $6. Bought: Andy Pettitte $17, Javier Vazquez $16, Fausto Carmona $2, Adam Loewen $7, Fernando Rodney $2.

Team I historically never pays $30+ for an ace, so having Lackey break out with a $30+ season and Carmona coming out of nowhere pretty much guaranteed a strong staff. Like Team H, there are no huge busts to be found here, as even the wins contributions from Pettitte and Washburn gave Team I 12 wins points. If there's anything to quibble with, it's wasting $10 on Shields: middle relievers seldom have this long of a shelf life, and Shields predictably didn't earn his keep in 2007.

Team C: $193/$65. 3rd. Offense - 31 points (3rd, tie). Pitching - 33 points (4th).
Froze: Josh Beckett $31, Erik Bedard $9, Joe Blanton $10, Jered Weaver $10. Bought: Carlos Silva $1, Joe Kennedy $1, Jorge de la Rosa $1, Jeremy Accardo $1, Jaret Wright $1.

Like Team H, Team C refused to spend more than $1 on any of its auction buys. C, though, lucked out on Accardo and picked up four saves points for $1. I didn't like freezing Beckett at $31 coming into the season, but it clearly worked out, and the rest of this staff is extremely strong from top to bottom, with de la Rosa and Wright providing enough negative value to keep Team C out of first in ERA/WHIP.

Team L: $154/$106. 8th. Offense - 22 points (8th). Pitching - 28.5 points (5th).
Froze: Kyle Farnsworth $1, Akinori Otsuka $1, Johan Santana $47, Justin Verlander $12. Bought: Mariano Rivera $37, Sidney Ponson $1, Jon Lester $5, Ramon Ortiz $1, Dustin Moseley $1.

The idea of building a staff behind Santana and Verlander was a solid one, but I would have ditched saves or picked up more $1-2 relievers like Farnsworth and Otsuka in the auction and hoped to catch lightning in a bottle. Ponson and Ortiz drag Team L down in WHIP despite Santana's extremely positive earnings there. You can see the problem of locking into a $47 starter...you're stuck choosing between buying no closer, buying a cheap closer or set-up man for a shaky one, or spending less on offense. Predictably, a $154 offense is going to finish in the bottom half of the pile.

Team K: $169/$91. 1st. Offense - 46 points (1st). Pitching 27 points (6th).
Froze: Daniel Cabrera $5, Octavio Dotel $1, Carl Pavano $3, Chien-Ming Wang $4. Bought: Francisco Rodriguez $40, Kelvim Escobar $22, Francisco Liriano $14, Ryan Braun $1, Juan Rincon $1.

I'm surprised this staff isn't worse in points, though Escobar (earned $25) and Wang (earned $23) take Team K a long way. Once again, we see the problem with investing in a $40 closer, as it ties Team K into investing nearly 50% of its budget into one pitcher. The Liriano buy is even more mystifying; at some point, his price became prohibitive for a dump deal mid year. Fortunately, $169 went a long way on offense, as A-Rod ($42) and Crawford ($50) turned an amazing $3 combined profit while freezes Nick Markakis ($4), B.J. Upton ($10) and Matt Stairs ($2) earned a combined $81. Getting that much value/profit from five players pretty much means checkmate for the rest of the field.

Team E: $190/$70. 7th. Offense - 29 points (5th). Pitching - 26 points (7th).
Froze: Jon Garland $2, Todd Jones $12, Mike Mussina $14, Justin Speier $1. Bought: Rich Harden $25, Paul Byrd $4, Bartolo Colon $6, James Shields $3, Tomo Ohka $3.

The decision to anchor its staff with Harden pretty much guaranteed Team E a middle-of-the-pack finish, and plucking Shields out of the sky was more lucky than good, judging by some of the other buys on Auction Day. The wins from Byrd help, but Colon and Ohka are disasters. Surprisingly, Jones alone earned this team 6 saves points. In retrospect, this could have turned out a lot worse.

Team B: $184/$75. 9th. Offense - 20 points (10th). Pitching - 25.5 points (8th).
Froze: Kiko Calero $1, Scott Kazmir $16, Tim Wakefield $5, Joe Borowski $21, Cliff Lee $10, Esteban Loaiza $6, Jeff Weaver $5, Rafael Betancourt $7, David Riske $4.

This is another case where it could have been a lot worse. Borowski and Betancourt's combined $54 earnings go a long way toward keeping Team B out of the cellar in ERA/WHIP, and Borowski's league leading save total is good for 10 points in the hypotheticals. The starting pitching is weak, with only Kazmir and Wakefield providing modest contributions, though you would expect more than par value or close to it from your freezes.

Team G: $137/$120. 11th. Offense - 10.5 points (11th). Pitching - 25 points (9th).
Froze: Kenny Rogers $1, Curt Schilling $25. Bought: Joe Nathan $45, Eric Gagne $18, Jake Westbrook $14, Jesse Crain $3, Al Reyes $10, Mike Maroth $2, Brandon Morrow $2.

Twelve of the pitching points are saves points, as Nathan, Gagne, and Reyes give Team G a 23 save lead on the next best team. This team falls nearly 300 IP short in the hypotheticals, which means that to seriously contend it would have had to have scrambled to pick up starters to replace injured/traded Rogers, Westbrook and Maroth at one time or another. The 10.5 points on offense are mostly from stolen bases.

Team J: $190/$69. 5th. Offense - 42 points (2nd). Pitching - 18 points (10th).
Froze: Jeremy Bonderman $7, Jose Contreras $13, Bobby Jenks $10, Ervin Santana $10, Joel Zumaya $5. Bought: Gil Meche $11, Mike Macdougal $6, Robinson Tejeda $5, Pat Neshek $2.

Jenks and Neshek keep Team J from being a runaway disaster in ERA/WHIP, and even then J can only pick up five combined ERA/WHIP points. When your best starter (Meche) earns $15 and the rest of your starters earn a negative $29, this is what's going to happen to your pitching numbers. Once again, we see that the splits on offense lead to inconsistent results. $190 more than the average $175 per team on offense, but not radically so.

Given the high hitting/pitching splits, this is about where you'd expect things to fall out. All of the frozen starting pitchers (Bonderman $7, Contreras $10, E. Santana $10) crashed and burned, and only an $11 auction buy of Gil Meche prevented it from being far worse. A $10F Bobby Jenks provided seven saves points, but expensive middle relief buys of Mike Macdougal ($6) and Joel Zumaya ($5F) would have been better spent elsehwere.

Team D: $200/$60. 12th. Offense - 8 points (last). Pitching - 8 points (11th).
Froze: None. Bought: Boof Bonser $13, Mark Buehrle $14, Kei Igawa $15, Fernando Cabrera $4, Brandon McCarthy $9, Chad Gaudin $1, John Danks $2, Jason Frasor $1, Juan Salas $1.

Nothing went right here. Like Team I, Team D eschewed buying a top-tier starter, but got burned with all of its starters except Buehrle who was similar to Meche: he didn't provide enough value to offset all of the negatives here. The cheap reliever strategy didn't turn into any saves points, and the result is a limp pitching staff. The $200 spent on offense didn't go far, as the stars/scrubs strategy employed here centered around Vladimir Guerrero ($44), Vernon Wells ($34) and Miguel Tejada ($35). Spending $112 on these guys last year left the rest of the offense with too much ground to gain during the year.

Team A: $192/$68. 10th. Offense - 31 points (3rd tie). Pitching - 7 points (12th).
Froze: Felix Hernandez $15, Kevin Millwood $12, Vicente Padilla $4, Nate Robertson $1, B.J. Ryan $15. Bought: Jeremy Sowers $18, Danys Baez $1, Joel Peralta $1, Tom Mastny $1.

For a team to finish last in the pitching categories, it needs a combination of bad luck (Ryan's injury out of the gate), questionable freezes (freezing Millwood or Padilla was probably OK, but freezing both was asking for trouble) and subpar performances (shouldn't Hernandez be an ace by now? His owners have certainly been hyping him up like one.) Team A was victimized by all of it, and then bought 2006's second-half hero Sowers for more than proven vets like Pettitte and Vazquez went for in the same auction.

There's more flexibility than I thought in team budgets. Anything over $100 spent on your pitching staff seems to lead to trouble, but spending $91 on your staff even when a lot of other owners are spending $70 or less isn't necessarily a formula for failure. Freezes obviously play a huge role in this equation, but there is something to be said for the way these staffs were put together. Staying away from one huge investment on the pitching side seemed to help, and teams that put most of their pitching budgets into freezes were handsomely rewarded. These factors, more than a specific dollar allocation to your pitching staff, are what you should keep in mind when buying the nine arms that you'll leave your auction with next April.