Proposal to tweak pitcher scoring

[Former Gas Can Turtles (Slava)]

I was brainstorming about how to improve pitching scoring... I was kind of at a loss. It'd be a lot easier, even with linear scoring if we could at least separate starting pitchers and relief pitchers, but alas, we can't.

Still, there's something I'd like to put up for consideration. We mostly don't focus on wins as a stat, nor saves. At least not to a large extent, but 20 points is a lot, and I don't think it's unimportant, but I think it hurts players on bad teams, plus it lets relief pitchers fall into lucky wins every now and then, which are pretty much meaningless in my opinion. Anyway, my suggestion is dividing the stat into 2 components. W and QS, giving each an equal weight of .5. I think this will better reflect reality.

Let me know what you guys think.

[The Birds (Davey Johnson)]

I never liked the fact that the W, L, S, BS, and HLD stats play such significant roles in the pitchers scoring, especially with research such as DIPS(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Independent_Pitching_Statistics) that has the potential to give us more accurate scoring based on a pitchers true ability and performance. For an individual game, the points awarded/deducted for one lucky/unlucky performance does appear extreme at times, but over the course of an entire season, the results are not bad at all. Notice that the two Cy Young award winners of 2010 are #1 and #2 in the pitcher's scoring totals despite King Felix only having a 13-12 record.

Based on past policy, we are not likely to entertain any changes in scoring for this season, because a sudden change can shift the values of individual pitchers overnight, and we don't want that in a keeper league. Having said that, I would like to see some discussion on possibly improving the scoring for pitchers in 2012 or beyond, and I believe adding QS as a scoring variable is an excellent suggestion.

[SultansOfSquat (Man)]

We can discuss this further maybe for next year.

If we want to derive something using DIPS, maybe we could start now and simulate the results w/ a test league on Yahoo. IIRC, none of the DIPS formulas are linear, so it's not a straightforward thing to try for the points system. I guess one possibility might be if you can convert something like DIPS ERA or FIPS into a close, linear approximation to generate the DIPS Runs, we could use that to do IP - DIPS Runs +/- maybe Some Constant (to adjust for league average runs environment).

Failing that, if people want, maybe we can just reduce the impact of those other pitching stats while adding QS to the mix.

I'm certainly not opposed to the idea myself -- although I'm not sure how the rest of the league feels...

[Former Center for Ants (Brad)]

I dunno. Maybe just have points awarded for K, and have points taken away for HBP. Maybe something like .3/K and -.1/BB. Or we could use FIP, and scale it so that the points match what we want the "actual" numbers of pitching points to end up at.

Just guessing, maybe something like this?

QS (quality start): 2 pts.
IP: 1 pt.
K: .2 pt.
BB: -.3 pt.
HR: -1.3 pt.

while keeping holds and saves at the same values they are now... maybe bump them up the HLD and SV to like .4 or .5, to account for the fact that relievers can't "vulture" quality starts. Just a thought...

[Former Sneaker Pimps (Graham)]

Yes, I'd also like to see QS added as a stat.