[TNIRISHFAN]

So I did a Fantasy Draft 2015 real MLB teams with fictional player league where I knew going in that I was going to only use Relief Pitchers.

I am General Manager only, but I maintain control over the pitching rotation. I have a hard 40 pitch count for the whole franchise and I have a quick hook for both starters and relievers. I also have my pinch hit for pitchers on the highest setting.

The Macro picture is this: surprising winning record the first year, wildcard loss the second, best record in baseball loss in divisional series third, loss in World Series fourth and World Series Sweep in the 5th season. On a side note, in the 5th year my owner died halfway through the season and his son is a jerk. We won the World Series and I have my team signed through the next year, but the son has cut my budget even though we made money during the world series run.

A few specifics:

I run 3 "starters" and 10 in the bullpen. When I have starters I usually run 12 pitchers, but needed to have more arms to run this experiment. When I drafted my team I drafted position players for the first 12 positions and then drafted 13 straight relievers. Everyone is set to middle reliever with a secondary role of emergency starting pitcher.

When I drafted my position players I made sure that I had a good defense. The key to my pitching staff was high stuff/movement and high groundball tendency.

If a pitcher was injured more than 4 days, he went on the DL and a minor league guy was called up. I tried to have a house rule of never calling up a guy who had been down for less than 10 days, but I'm not sure how well I stuck to that.

Pitchers did not break down at a higher rate even though most of them spent the year tired.

If a guy had a high ERA, I would dive into the metrics of that to see what was going on, if it was high BABIP I would let it ride, if not I would rotate him into the minors pretty quickly. One thing this will really drive you away from is worrying about pitcher wins and losses, your starters won’t have any wins and occasionally you will have a reliever end up with over 30. Saves also mean nothing because anyone can get one. Overall my team ERA was in the top 5 of the National League most years.

I am able to afford a much higher payroll for position players because my pitching staff is inexpensive. Most of my drafts are easier to sign because I am not signing the big money starting pitchers. It’s relatively easy to stack the minors with a bunch of big arm high groundball % pitchers. This makes it easier to let the ones wanting big money walk.

I really like the way this has worked out, I think it would be harder to do if you start with a set roster, but I think that having the fantasy draft allowed me to set the whole franchise up to be prepared to make this work. I like the strategy so well that I am going to continue to do it and play this team