Preseason 2020 Blog Series Part 3: Summer Camp Edition!

Dave and his wife are expecting a baby due in December, so Dave and Bryce Harper will both have some tough decisions to make about their COVID quarantine bubbles. Congratulations!

It’s time for Summer Camp! Apparently this is what MLB has decided to call this 3 week training session between the COVID layoff and the beginning of games at the end of July. For Floored, as we transition into a one-year and keeper-free season, it changes the game significantly.  Let’s review some of the changes for the year:

The draft is going to be next Sunday, June 19^th at 3 PM Eastern Time. Max has already said he wouldn’t be able to make any time work in July before like 10 PM ET since he’s out trying to start a business. What a jerk. I texted everyone and got no other objections. So this will be the time.

Rotisserie vs Head to Head

We are going to have a Rotisserie league this year. It’s the only practical way to do this. The only fair way to have a real head to head fantasy season is to play every team at least once and there just wasn’t time to do that and have a playoff. And what fun is a head to head fantasy season without a playoff?

Keeper status

After a near unanimous vote, we will not be considering keepers this year. That means that Ryan will get a season of Floored fantasy baseball under his before needing to decide how valuable Javier Baez and Trevor Story are to him. Michael also gets a free year to see if Fernando Tatis Jr was a one year fluke or might be the next three year stud keeper on the horizon….or more likely somewhere in between.

How many games makes a ‘championship season’

For the purposes of adding a name to the trophy, we will consider it a valid season with a champion if three quarters of the MLB games get completed. That’s an average of 45 games per team, but given that some teams may finish 43 and some may finish 46, I’ll set the rule as an average of 45 per MLB team.

Asterisk

There will be no asterisk on the trophy if we get through a ‘championship season.’ I’d argue that this season may create more of a true best-team-in-the-league-type champion than our head to head format in a two-week, four-team playoff creates. So. No asterisk. (…is it actually more of a true champion? Sounds like a great future blog post)

Scoring Categories

After some consideration to change some pitching categories based on the expectation that starting pitchers may not be fully stretched out by opening day, making Wins and Quality Starts somewhat of a crapshoot the first month, we will not be changing any categories. For one, this leads to strategy decisions that are good for the game and for two, I think pitchers may end up more stretched out by July 24^th than we were expecting two weeks ago, and for three, let’t not change too much this season.

Waivers

I lowered the waiver waiting period to 1 day. If someone is dropped, we may need to move quickly this season so no sense keeping them on waivers for two whole days. This also should help with post-draft, pre-first game player adds. We’ve run into issues with that before that this should help with.

There are two decisions that the most up up for debate.

DL/Bench Spots

Given the increased risk of players being added to some sort of Injured or COVID list throughout the year, we need to add some depth to the teams. The easiest way to to do this would be more bench spots, but this league has also pushed back against deeper benches in the past, so instead I am opening up the injured list from 2 to 4 people. We’ll have to see what yahoo offers on this front. Hopefully they don’t make it difficult to manage. If we’re going to change this we’ll need to decide before the draft.

Weekly Transaction Caps

Yahoo doesn’t allow for a weekly transaction cap in a rotisserie league, so we have two options. Season-long transaction cap or total innings pitched limit. I have gone back and forth on this. The advantage of a transaction cap is it directly limits pitcher streaming, but the drawback is it could really limit a team’s flexibility if a series of their players get COVID. The advantage of an innings pitched cap is it levels the playing field for those that want to stream and not stream, but the disadvantage is…at least in theory…it undoes some of our progress we’ve made in making our league more of an even playing field for starting pitchers because if the IP limit is too low, then it gives an advantage to relief pitchers that have higher strikeout per inning rates (granted this advantage is less with our Wins and Quality Start categories).

So. After consulting a handful of the more…I’ll say passionate…league members, we are going to go with an innings cap. As long as we pick a high enough limit Starting Pitchers remain valuable and teams are protected if they need to make a bunch of moves for injured players.

To determine what the cap should be, I consulted what the stats were from the first 9 weeks of last season (matching this 9 week season (it’s actually 9.5 weeks just like last season’s first 9 weeks were 9.5 calendar weeks)). The average IP per team was 520 innings with high of 717 and a low of 403. 520 innings was an average of 57.8 IP/week, the median was a close 55 IP/week.

For comparison, by the final week of the year, the IP/week was up to 60 IP/week. The contending teams realized that more IP meant more pitching strikeouts and chances at Wins and Quality Starts. The max IP/week for the league was 76 IP/week and the median IP/week was 64 IP/week by the end of the year. There was a bit of a gap between those that pushed IP up and those that kinda gave up by the end of the year, leading to a notable delta between average and median.

I believe teams should be able to run their teams with whatever strategy they’d like, with the only caveat that I don’t want to reward the team that can spend the most time streaming pitchers solely because they have the time to stream pitchers. So I am going to set the limit to 70 IP per week for the 9.5 season weeks for a total of 665 IP. The closest limit to this number allowed in Yahoo’s system is 675 IP.

This number can be debated up until draft day, so if you have a different number in mind, let’s hear your logic and we can talk it out.

That’s enough for this week, next week we’ll dive into how definitive a 9 week rotisserie (power ranks) champion has been compared to end of season standings and rankings.