I recently began a season in a $100mil theme league where there are no AAA players. So, in other words, the team that you draft would have to carry you through the entire season, save for the allowance of the WW and trades. At any rate, believe it or not - lol - since I more often than not play in OLs, I have this habit of skimping on PAs and IPs so as to be able to draft higher production guys who aren't truly everyday players, as I use my assigned AAA players, including those I might obtain through trades, generously. And as anyone who has played in leagues with me can attest to, due to my skimping on PAs and IPs, my teams generally start out slow and then pick it up and make a mad dash for the finish after the transaction deadline where my low PA low IP guys are expected to do some serious damage down the stretch.
Well, be that as it may, when I drafted my team for the above mentioned $100mil league, old habits were apparently hard to break, and what did I do? Used the same stragegy as I do in OLs - top notch pitching 15 Pete Alexander, 95 Maddux, and 88 Elton and 08 Steele in a tandem) and high avg. singles, doubles and triples hitters, including11 Ty Cobb. Foolishly, based on whatever I had to be smoking at the time, I drafted barley 1300 IP for this team, to play at my favorite park Hilltop nonetheless. Well, I guess you can figure out what happened after a few games. First of all, for whatever reason, I missed a couple of lineup re-sets after a couple of games into the season; then, being that four of the positions in the lineup were either a platoon or manned by lower PA guys, the couple of games were I failed to re-set my lineup to include backups, some of my guys were quickly in the "blue" and even faster into the "red" as I tried to mix and match and bide time until the 'damp' factor wore off, but no dice!!! My pitchers became so fatigued, as all of them were in the red after only a few days. And when I tanked a few games in a row with $200K scrubs and nearly got my pitchers back to NEARLY usable again, Sparky would bring them all in and burn them out yet AGAIN. It was like a nightmare!!!!!
Anyway, through all of this, I decided that enough was enough and decided to take some drastic actions. I dumped Cobb for the more cost friendly 95 Sam Thompson, cut one of my platoon guys (29 Bob Fothergill), acquired and dumped numerous fill in guys, and dumped serious fatigued pitchers such as 88 Elton, 60 Marshall Bridges, 08 Elmer Steele, 19 Ray Caldwell, and even 10 Kenley Jansen. In all, I must have made 25 or more WW transactions after only 25 games, my team is in dead last, and I'm STILL doing damage control!!!!!
The moral of the story......MAKE SURE YOU DRAFT ENOUGH PAs and IPs, ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE'S NO AAA!!!!!!! LOL