RULES CHANGE PROPOSAL - Increase Pitching Points

[ldsjayhawk]

There have been two schools of thought regarding increasing pitching limits.  The idea of increasing pitching points or the value of pitchers has been brought up in lieu of increasing limits.  I am posting this for further discussion surrounding the possibility of increasing the value of pitchers.

Please provide your ideas of how we would increase pitcher points / values.

[jschwab]

Another way you could go with this would be to limit the number of starts per week, but not the IP. Then work with the points structure within that. I am in another league that does this and the value of RP went up considerably. That particular league haws a 8 games started limit per week.

[game162]

For context, the top hitter (Judge) scored 6606 points and the top pitcher (Skubal) scored 2172 in 2024, 33% of what Judge scored.  If you average the top 5 hitters vs the top 5 SP's, the SP's are scoring only 38.5% of the hitter scoring.

I do not think a SP is as valuable as an every day player, but I'm having difficulty reconciling this much of a scoring gap.

Collectively, I think we should align on a target % for SP scoring vs hitters and then figure out what modifications should happen to reach that target. Personally, I would like to see SP's scoring 60% - 70% of similarly ranked hitters.

Any scoring changes would trickle down to RP's making them more valuable as well.

[ldsjayhawk]

So, based on the information in the rules for the way the league was setup, this seems right in line with the design:

"We found a way to value player's contributions to run creation and run prevention in a Bill James manner that correlates to the game as much as possible.  James' research concluded that 47% / 17% / 36% of wins comes from hitting / fielding / pitching, respectively.  You will see these ratios in the breakdown of the stats in ranges of players."

I personally like having more value in the pitching than we do, but I hesitate to change such a fundamental aspect of this league.  To me this falls under the same category as the variable salary cap.

One thing I do wonder is if there's has been any additional information or observation regarding his calculations in the 15 years since the league has started?

I would also be curious to see if we examined the overall picture of hitting, fielding and pitching if we would find the league scoring to match up with those expectations.

One additional observation is there is no way to account for a pitchers fielding stats.  How much value is lost there?

[game162]

That's interesting context around the league creation...I wasn't aware of that, or it's been so long since I read the scoring rules that I forgot about it.

I know WAR pre-dates the league, so we could debate which is the more recent analysis between the 47/17/36% split or WAR values...but I think we can all agree WAR is more mainstream now than it was when the league started and is the current the standard for valuing players.

Here's the league leader board for WAR in 2024:

https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/war

Top hitter: Judge  at 11.2 WAR
Top pitcher: Sale at 6.4 WAR (57% of Judge)

Also averaging the top 5 pitchers vs top 5 hitters is pretty consistent at 58.5%.

I think this is the reality we should be targeting with our scoring system.