I took over a team in a single season progressive league in 1948 recently. Had a good draft - got Alvin Dark to play SS on a team that had no SS before (but with the  proviso that he will undergo sensitivity training under the supervision of Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson before he is allowed to manage), added OF Whitey Lockman to a long-term lineup that includes Gil Hodges, all in all not bad. 

The starting rotation leaves me with a decision to make however: There are thankfully (to the previous owner) four starters with plenty of IP for a 4-man rotation. They are Murray Dickson, Bill Wight, Joe Coleman and Cliff Fannin.  All of them have between 227 and 260 IP, have WHIPs hovering around 1.40 or worse, OAVs around .260, except for Fannin at .245.

Then, there is Virgil Trucks, who is better than the other 4, and has 223 IP; an OAV of .240 and a WHIP of 1.30. 

The problem is, he has an IP/G of 4.92. Now, from a zillion forum posts, and some experience, I know that this is the sort of pitcher who presents some difficulties in the SIM, because he both starts and relieves. 

For the moment I have him as a fifth starter, because I find that on the first couple of times through the rotation cycle, adding an additional starter to a 3 or 4 man rotation helps even out that start of the season in the red fatigue problem. But after that, what to do?

I want to put him in the bullpen, have him as setup A if only because that presumably gets him into 70 games instead of 55 as Long A, and set the four starters pitch counts a little on the low end, and maybe even set them not at 1 as I nearly always do with starters, but at 2 or even 3 to get the ball to him. 

Now, I know that the "superman" strategy, as it used to be called, is not possible due to appearance fatigue. So, how do I get the most out of him - simply having him as a starter and facing reality that I can't do as I would like and maximize the number of games he pitches in ? I currently have his pitch count set at TPC 60, MPC 75. But again, that is for the temporary role as dampener of the damping effect in the first few games of the season. 

Having him start will get me more or less all his 223 IP plus the 10% but he will be in trouble after roughly 75 pitches, or 5 innings. The rest of the bullpen is pretty good - Steve Gromek and Howie Judson with around 250 IP between them are the highlight, but it is far from lights out, though with Trucks, Gromek and Judson I could base the staff on relief and use the starters to get us to inning five. 

The problem remains, though, how to deal best with the appearance fatigue issue if he does not start, with the in-game fatigue if he does, and the same would go to a much greater degree with Gromek and Judson were they to be in the rotation which is not my plan. 

Any insight into the best way to get the maximum value out of Trucks under these conditions ? 

Your bullpen is good?  Then start him as much as you can with a  75 MPC .  Like Contrarian said, you should get around 55 starts out of him.

I would try really hard to find a way to stick him in a tandem. I'm not sure how deep your 'pen is or whether contrarian's idea of using 6 guys in 3 tandems is feasible. So maybe that's not the best way to go.

As an alternative I'd manage him manually, leaving him as Setup A and giving him a few spot starts here and there to make sure you max out his innings. Maybe just tandem him up with Gromek whenever you want to spot him. 

Thanks all three of you - three great people to get advice on for pitching.

Yes jfranco77, I think it's feasible. It is not a great staff, but except for one mopup they are all presentable pitchers and the one big asset is five 220+ IP pitchers and three others with 95 IP +. I am wondering how crazy it would be do just tandem all 8, with the 95 IP guy matched up with the highest IP pitcher on the staff and so on down.

In that case I would set everyone as available in relief as well and see what happens, since I can micro-manage this staff more days than not if I have to. 

But today at least I am leaning toward something much more conventional: I look at the staff right now and it seems to be saying to me: "don't be a fool, yes it would be nice to get Trucks into more games, but you are staring at a natural 5-man rotation, with no fatigue issues ever and a bullpen with plenty of backup in that case. 

Here are the IP/162 numbers:

Dickson - 266
Wight - 239
Coleman - 227
Fannin - 227
Trucks - 223 

That is a rotation that will not tire easily. It is true that I could tandem them all plus Gromek with 136, tying him to Dickson and that would give the following:

Dickson-Gromek - 402
Wight-Trucks - 461
Coleman-Fannin - 454

It certainly looks like a case for either a 3-man OR a five man rotation but not a four man which is my usual default (I also keep thinking the 1960s will come back, so forgive me these occasional follies). 

The bullpen is:

Gromek - 136
Judson - 115
Behrman - 96
Trinkle - 75
Staley - 55 
there is also Black -55 but with a WHIP of 1.87 I have set him on mopup, at best he could be long B. But his IP are there. 

So either way there is no shortage of arms and innings to worry about, even without Gromek if I put him in a tandem 341 decent IP and another 55 mop up seems sufficient ad it is more than 2 IP per game of relief available and that with no shortage of innings from the 6 tandem-starters. Same goes with a 5 man rotation - in that case close to 1,200 IP from 5 starters, plus Gromek's 136 added to the bullpen gives me 478 among relievers. 

So the real question is how to maximize the IP actually used by the better pitchers overall, and if anything is going to be left on the bench make it more likely to be the worst of the IP available. One option is to see who needs SP innings badly enough to trade some reasonable usable player or draft pick for one of the starters of course, but leaving that out for now: the worst WHIP and ERC (I am assuming that normalization is a minor factor in a single season league, am not using the # stats here) are Wight's by far, not counting the unspeakably bad numbers from Black. So I could just take Wight out of the rotation, put him on long B and keep Black at mopup, have Wight in any case spot start to keep fatigue from hitting the four starters that would now include the best of the bunch, Trucks, and still have four good (not great, but reasonably good) relievers with 75-136 IP each to handle all the Long A/Setup A stuff. 

So, I have narrowed it to three options thinking out loud with help from three great thinkers here. Many thanks, and if anything here is seriously wrong, I hope one or more of you will tell me as I figure out which of these three options - 3 man tandems, five man, four man with worst "starter" at Long B instead, is the one to go with. 

I think a 4-part tandem is a really bad idea.  The 3-part you listed up above already would allow you to get 8 innings/game out of your starters without fatigue issues if they pitched well enough.  Putting more innings into the starting tandems A) wastes innings and B) makes your bullpen very thin.  With only 2 decent, shortish-inning arms left in the bullpen a bad start by Dickson would kill you.  If he gets shelled and pulled in the 2nd, Gromek is probably out by the end of the 5th at the absolute latest.  Where are you getting 4 more innings?  Even 2 on a regular basis would be deadly.  4-part tandem would waste a lot of innings from the guys in the tandems and overextend the guys who weren't.

Also, if Wight is your worst guy "by far," I wouldn't put him in the tandem with Trucks.  If he consistently gives up 3 runs you could wind up using a lot of Trucks' innings in effectively low-leverage situations in difficult-to-win games, depending on the quality of your offense.

Go figure. After all that Dickson turned in a 3-hit masterpiece on opening day. Who knows?

Maybe these guys were better in 1948 than they look on paper.

We'll see.

Still weighing either of two options about how to proceed: four-man with with Trucks in and Wight out and on long relief, or five-man. In the end the exotic stuff didn't convince me it would work easily.

But on another team, with a weird staff where I have between 7-8 potential starters I decided to do something this crowd might appreciate just to experiment: Five okay-to-mediocre starters each with a little lower pitch count that warranted and call bullpen on 3, two bullpen guys on Long A or B also with 3 on call bullpen ...and the two best starters, Pedro and Sutcliffe alone on setup A with 40/50 PCs and call bullpen on 1. It is a variation on both the idea contrarian23 had here about how to use Trucks as the only setup A, and the old "Superman" strategy. 

I figured the main problem with that strategy is that Superman needed Robin, or pick your superhero sidekick, Bullwinkle ("now we keeel moose and squirrel !"), whatever. In other words, the appearance fatigue toasts the pitcher you try to use in this way. But Pedro and Sutcliffe has 220 + IP each, and if they each do a normal 70 appearances as setup that is potentially up to a maximum of 140 games with my two best pitchers, though undoubtedly they will both come in to a number of games. But if it get close even to 100 that would be an interesting experiment. The only other pitcher on 1 for call bullpen in the closer Hennemann '91.

So the idea is to get 5-6 IP max from the mediocre starters and get the ball to Pedro and Sutcliffe and then to Hennemann in the 9th when there is a save situation. 

I will keep you all posted on how it works. 

Should work fine. I've used a similar strategy in a 1920s progressive with high IP starters in the setup role and gotten 90-105 appearances with very little "overworked, this pitcher has appeared in XX% of team games" showing. I think you'll get more than 70 appearances out of them.

Great news frazzman80 'cause it's in your league !

Thank you. 

Figured...glad you're in the other league.

After a couple weeks' worth of games to experiment, I decided on contrarian23's suggestion of putting Trucks and only Trucks on setup A, and I put Wight on a little lower pitch count than the others. Though I must  say that while so far Trucks has not been brilliant (not awful either though) in this role, Dickson has been a real ace, far exceeding expectations (thanks forum jinx. Got to get me those HOF cheat codes to deal with that...), and Gromek has been brilliant in the bullpen as a closer. 

So I am still learning about these players. Good experience. 

As to the thing that jumped out of this original thread - the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" (now we keeel moose and squirrel") strategic variation of the old "Superman" system, I am now using it for two teams, one being the aforementioned  Pedro-Sutcliffe team, though by the following season, barring getting another couple of decent starters, I will have to put them both in the rotation. The other is a pretty bad team in 1974 with a pretty good rotation already of Seaver, McNally, Cleveland and Lagrow. There is a reasonably good bullpen of Al Downing (who can spot start, esp. at the start of the season as I find using a 5th starter helps with the early fatigue situation), Briles for long relief, Broberg and Garber who has a bit of an off year.

But there are two gems that I decided not to put in the rotation this season: Tommy John and Rudy May, both with nice WHIPs and with 300 IP between them. So after Seaver and McNally the other starters are on lower PCs and higher call bullpen settings and I am going to try to get the ball to these two. 

So, two experiments in whether you can overcome the obstacle to the Superman strategy merely by doubling up and having enough overall IP. In theory, each of these guys as Setup A and being the only two setup As, can pitch in 70 games. Even assuming a lot of overlap, I should get them in 100. Will keep y'all posted. 

Well, 25 games into the season I have abandoned the Pedro Martinez-Rick Sutcliffe duo at Setup A, NOT because it wasn't working - both have performed beautifully, Pedro with a WHIP of 1.07 and Sutcliffe with 1.11. What has thrown a monkey wrench into the works is that while 4 of my 5 starters are pitching at pennant winning levels (Livan Hernandez, Mike Hampton, Kevin Gross and Joe Blanton), the 5th Mike Sirotka, is 0-4 with an ERA of 9.69. The team is 10-15 overall. 

It may be early to pull the plug, and I may reconsider later, but I have put Pedro into the rotation in place of Sirotka who is now Long A, and switched Donovan Osborne to be the other Setup man with Sutcliffe. 

May reconsider and try something else, since Pedro and Sutcliffe seem unbeatable together, but if the team is out of the game before the 6th anyway they don't do me much good. 

The 1948 season is over and Virgil Trucks did play setup A all season - here are the results:

Trucks: 106 games, 214 IP, W-L: 10-9, 6 saves, 3.49 ERA, .238 OAV, 1.34 WHIP.

The team, The Boston Braves, went 90-72, though 9 games behind first place Brooklyn. Cliff Fannin went 20-12, and Murry Dickson 19-13, both with ERAs over 4.00, and so I attribute part of their success to Trucks, part to Closer Steve Gromek (6-9, 30 saves). 

I picked up Ralph Branca in a trade more than midway through the season and am likely, with Branca as the best pitcher on the staff, to put he and Trucks back in the Rotation with the other two mentioned above for 1949. Anyway, interesting experiment and thanks to all for the advice early in the season. 

thanks for posting the results.   An interesting read.