Rules Change Proposal

Friends:

With updates impossible, how can I fill your time with EFL related comments?

Be not afraid.   We have a rules issue that need to be addressed.

 We have a gap in our rules about mid-month reallocations for pitchers.  League policy prohibits using mid-month reallocations to hide bad performances.  This is why we do not allow anyone to reduce a batter’s allocation in the process of replacing injured or demoted players.  You can transfer plate appearances from the bench or OH to a position, but you can’t transfer allocated plate appearances away from a position.

For pitchers it’s not so easy.  We can only identify pitchers to three slots: starters, relievers, or on the bench.  No pitcher can be both a starter and a reliever at the same time — for both logistical reasons pertaining to the old spreadsheets, and realism reasons reflecting an MLB pitcher’s inability to switch between relieving and starting as easily as a fielder can switch between second and shortstop.

Under our current rules, if you want to replace a starter, you have two choices: you can activate a pitcher from the bench if he’s not already at least partly allocated as a reliever, or you can switch a reliever to being a starter.  Activating benched pitchers is not a problem, but switching a reliever to starting might be. We limit the number of innings you can swap into an injured player’s position. The limit is 3% of the player’s innings per day left in the month.

So a player who starts a month allocated 100% to relieving (but who is a starter in MLB) could have 30 innings by the end of the month.  If those are ugly, 6.00 ERA innings, it would be pretty sweet to sub him for an injured starter on the 29th, be limited to 6% of those innings, and end up ditching 94% of those 6.00 ERA innings.

The same can happen when switching a starter to relieving.

I propose the following Rule A effective immediately for the rest of the season.:

No player may be moved between starting and relieving as a mid-month replacement when his monthly ERA is higher than the team’s pre-replacement monthly ERA.

This rule, for immediate effect, would prevent us from hiding bad innings via a mid-month replacement move.

And I propose the following simpler Rule B to replace Rule A after this season:

No player may be moved from starting pitcher to relief pitcher, or vice versa, as a mid-month replacement.

Under this rule, to replace a pitcher mid-month, you’d have to have a pitcher on the bench either entirely unallocated, or with a partial allocation that matches the injured or demoted player.  If we adopt this rule, starting next year everyone will want a couple of competent pitchers to hold in reserve on the bench. I favor this as our permanent rule for two reason. First, it will simpler to administer. Second, it’s my opening move in a bid to keep our EFL teams from dominating the MLB teams too badly.

Feel free to discuss this in the comments. We’ll vote on it at Fridays 4 pm PDT meeting.

 

Post Script:  I believe I will be able to have the free agent list completed and published by bed time this evening. I apologize for the delay. This is also grading-deadline time for Spring Semester. And it is syllabus writing and publishing time for my summer business law classes, starting up this morning. So I have a little bit on my plate. Perhaps we need to adopt a rule change revising the University’s schedule to make this a little easier.