In their effort to limit pitcher churning in head-to-head leagues, ESPN allows commissioners to set a weekly start limit.

The start limit has always had a loophole. The day you use your last start, all starts count. If you go into Sunday with six of seven starts accounted for, nothing prevents you from pitching multiple Sunday starters. With four SP roster slots a manager can easily hit 10 starts in any given week. This is most problematic in head-to-head playoffs when managers must win or go home.

The result is to devalue pitching even more than it already is. By churning, a manager can win two of the five common pitching stats — wins and strikeouts — with no investment in quality starters.

The obvious solution is to assign a depth chart rating to each pitching slot. On the day the start limit is reached, the depth chart determines the cut-off between starters who count and starters who don’t.

Instead of implementing the obvious solution, ESPN makes things worse. This season the default, maximum, and minimum start limits are based on the number of pitchers on your roster. Not the number of starters. The number of pitchers. If you have nine pitching slots, the starts limit is nine (most weeks).

I am solving this problem by lowering the number of pitching slots to seven –  three starting pitchers, four relief pitchers. The two slots removed are added to the bench. This gives managers much more flexibility and changes the ESPN minimum to six for most weeks. I will use seven. Lowering the number of starter slots also limits the last-day-loophole to the lower number of starters.

The disadvantage of this change is that it forces managers to become more active in handling their starters. If they miss a few days they may easily miss some starts. The very reason I have set more starting pitching slots in the past was to make it easier for managers to set their starters by the week.