Starting Pitchers vs. Middle Relievers

It doesn't take long for Rotisserie owners in deep leagues to get worn out on marginal starting pitchers, as Al tells us:

(Vicente) Padilla was definitely cannon fodder last night. Ouch! But then again I dropped another cannon fodder guy, Dustin Moseley, for him. Looks like I'll be looking for a safe, cheap middle reliever this week.

We play this game every year in 4x4 leagues. We start out by grabbing as many starting pitchers as possible. By the end of the year, we've shifted our focus to middle relievers.

Pitchers by Type: Billy Almon Brown Graduate (A.L.) 2007

	Starters	Closers	MR	Total
Auction	63	14	31	108
End of Year	55	15	38	108
Actual Values	50	16	42	108

Major League Baseball didn't expand the American League in season; I simply decided to include any reliever with 10+ saves as a closer in this chart.

Billy Almon Brown Graduate starts the year owning almost every starting pitcher in a Major League rotation (in actuality, a couple of these starters are guys like Matt Clement and Carl Pavano who are listed as starters but are on the D.L.). After five months of scuffling, we've jettisoned some of these guys; as it turns out, the Patton $ at the end of the year tell us that we haven't done quite enough to own the best 108 pitchers.

Why do we torture ourselves every year by buying so many starting pitchers? Don't we know they're going to fail?

The second question is easier to answer. Yes, we know they're going to fail. What we don't know is which pitchers are going to fail, which answers our first question quite nicely.

Furthermore, we know that the best pitchers are going to be starting pitchers. Of the Top 50 pitchers in the American League last year, 27 were starting pitchers, 16 were closers, and only seven were middle relievers. Middle relievers provide a safer return on our investment in the bottom half of pitchers, but if you want to win, you're going to need at least two and maybe three of those 27 starting pitchers at the top of the heap.

Some of these pitchers are incredibly predictable. Others, like James Shields last year, went for $3 and are utterly unpredictable. Yet others, like Dustin McGowan, are nowhere to be found at the beginning of last year.

That isn't to say that Al believed that Moseley or Padilla were going to morph into $20+ pitchers this season. However, the other component of the equation is that you do need at least one or two $5-10 earners to fill out the back of your staff so you can fulfill your league's innings requirement and have enough wins to compete in the category.

As the year goes along, we make decisions every week on who is worthy of rostering and who isn't. It's a decision made not just by one owner but by the marketplace. As teams fall out of the race, the decisions are influenced by who might turn into a keeper next year. In keeper leagues, Radhames Liz might be on more teams than Vicente Padilla come September.

The other factor that influences how many starting pitchers are owned is strategic. Teams that have nowhere to go in wins but don't want to hurt their ERA/WHIP might start carrying a lot of middle relievers toward the end of the year, while teams that are already dead in ERA/WHIP might start carrying nothing but starting pitchers to try and gobble up wins.