Hi everyone. New manager here.

I'm in a theme league that significantly limited my drafting choices, and we don't have trades or AAA or anything like that, so I am now stuck with the pitching staff that I drafted, whose collective IP is a little low. As a result, my bullpen is chronically beat up and I'm losing a lot of games by scores like 15-5. It's not uncommon for my starter to give up five or more runs in the first inning.

I've tried a few tweaks to ameliorate this. So far the thing that's worked the best is stacking my starting pitchers into tandem pairs. That way they recover pretty quickly from a tandem start and are practically never starting a game at less than 95% rest. (Mostly they're at 100% rest.) I've had some success with this but alas, the blowout losses are still far too common.

Here's what I don't get. I'm playing (more or less) the 2018 Red Sox, and okay here's David Price giving up 9 runs on 43 pitches in the opening 1? innings. Eduardo Rodriguez lasts only ? (burning 45 pitches) and I'm in the bullpen by the third inning!



Why is this even happening? Price was 100% rested, he was listed as the Tandem Starter, he's not that bad a pitcher. Ditto Rodriguez. And now my bullpen is all at 50% rest because they are throwing so many pitches over so many innings.

If this happened once or twice, okay, I get probability. But this doesn't strike me as a realistic or probable result when it happens again and again. What am I not understanding?

tl;dr What is going on with good pitchers at 100% rest repeatedly getting blown up in the first couple of innings?

First things first, let's fix the fatigue "death-spiral" you've found yourself in.

Put everyone on rest except for two pitchers. Generally I recommend your two lowest IP pitchers to save as many IP as possible, or your two most fatigued depending on how likely they are to recover, but given the theme league you're in and the level of competition, I'd recommend those two pitchers be Brian Johnson and Hector Velasquez. Set one as Starter #1 with a pitch count of 170 target, "none" max and a pull setting of 1. Put the other of those two as Mop Up with the same 170/none, pull 1 and make sure they're available in relief and available inning set to "any". Let these two go for 2-4 games, roughly how long it will take to reset the fatigue counter to 100 on the rest of your bullpen. You'll lose those games, but you have a chance of salvaging the rest of the season.

As for the why's, I think this is a combination of league dynamics and initial settings. If your pull-setting is higher than 1-2, your pitchers WILL get pulled much earlier than you generally intend. This will lead to a taxing of your bullpen. This isn't always a bad thing, if you also have your starters checked to be available in relief those lost innings from being pulled early can/will be made up in games they come in in relief. However, it's easier and more predictable to designate a pitch count and set then to a pull 1-2 to make sure they are approaching that PC before handing the ball to the bullpen.

Rodriguez in particular has been destroyed mostly by the '23 & '32 Yankees. Take out his 8.1 IP (and 22 ER) against these two teams and his ERA drops by more than 2 runs. This league has a mix of opponent quality that your pitching staff may struggle with, and your pitchers are also getting the negative effect of the ballpark double-dip often mentioned around here. As a whole, only Sale and Kimbrel are good enough to regularly face this caliber of hitting, but both of them look even worse because of the level of fatigue they've been pitching through. I would expect your team to have an ERA around 5.50-6.50 once you get them back on proper footing.

So, when you factor in the quality of opponent, don't be surprised if your pitchers are giving up 5-7 runs per game, but make sure their PCs are set to allow them to pitch deeper even if giving up runs or to come in in relief if you continue to have them pulled early.

It's easy to think of your team as great in real life, but getting ti face the Orioles multiple times is better for your stats and records than facing the '23 Yankees... Even the 2000 Pedro looks pedestrian when facing the '23 Ruth (and vice versa).

Wow, that's a lot of good information. Thank you so much.

Here's a thing that I tried that went very badly: Given that my bullpen was getting blasted for a long time, I figured I should manage my starting pitchers for maximum effective starting innings. And by that standard I figured I should move the rotation around so that the upcoming game would be started by whichever starting pitcher had the highest rest percentage (usually still 100%) and as a tiebreaker I'd go with the one with the best simulated ERA. Or at least the one that had been losing less than the others.

Wow. That was a disaster. I would start Chris Sale at 100%, because he had recovered quickly from the last start, and holy cow the first two innings would be like twelve runs.

All I can figure is that 100% isn't really 100%. Like, the algorithm treats a starter who's nominally at 100% differently depending on when he last started. Starting at 100% on two or three games' rest is still bad.

I am totally okay with giving up 5-7 runs per game. What I'm seeing is a lot of double-digit scoring. I gave up 44 runs in one game and 32 in a recent one. As you can imagine, that leads to gigantic pitch counts and total exhaustion of everyone.

Don't beat yourself up too much. From what I can tell, the league is terribly designed. It's a twist league (that's the WIS term for a league where your roster is made up of players from 1 team, but you can use any years of their career). Which is fine. But it has a cap of $255M which is WAY too high. Twist leagues should be capped at like $100M, otherwise you will get a small number of teams (like the 20s-30s Yankees) that will clobber anyone else's pitching staff. When you have the BEST seasons of Ruth-Gehrig-Lazzeri or Gehrig-DiMaggio-Dickey or Berra-DiMaggio-Mantle all on one team, there is no way that the pitching staff of the 2018 Red Sox can keep up with that.

You really need like 1500 innings of very high quality to compete in this league; instead you have 1400 innings of mediocre quality. I don't think there's a way out of this. Live and learn. Don't join 255M leagues in general, and definitely don't join them if your choice of players is going to be severely restricted as in this case.

To your fatigue point, all I can say is 100% is 100%. There is no "hidden adjustment" to that number.