The 8-pitch limit

There has been much talk (well, some talk.  Not as much as a David Wright gay post gets.) about the teams that go over the 8 start limit.  I decided to look at this problem from a more statistical point of view and see what the real effects are of going over the start limit.
First, I simply wanted to see who committed this most foul of sins most often. There have been 22 instances where teams have gone over the start limit, and 16 times where one team has gone over while the other has stayed within the limits (3 matchups where both teams went over).



Sabo is weighing in as the most starts over the limit with 5 instances over the limit and 11 total starts over the limit.  Sabo started 11 against me (as well as 11 against 1 other person, and 10 against 2 people), and I actually emailed him earlier in the week and he reveled in his limit-busting roster.  As a lawyer, I think that Sabo goes with the idea that if the law allows it, it is legal, which I guess is sort of true.  Loopholes are legal.  Don't hate the playa, hate the game.  I rest my case on your face, councilor.  Good job Kurt Locker, Ackbar, and Andrus, you are going to fantasy baseball heaven.  
It is all well and good for us to demonize the people who go over the limit, but was it really so bad to go over?  To answer this question, I had to look more specifically at the effect of going over the limit.  I went in with a number of assumptions:
- The more starts, the more Ks, and the people who went over the limit would be winning that category more often than losing it.
- Same with wins.
- Because you have so many more starters, you should not have as many closers and should thus be punting saves.  
- Because you are throwing out more guys, the chances of you starting a crap pitcher or having a poor performance should go way up, so the ERA should be higher when you go over the start limit.
- Same with WHIP.
- Same with K/9.

I looked at how many times a team that has gone over the start limit has taken a category when their opponent has stayed within the limit.  The results were not what I was expecting.



First of all, the way that I read these results is that the extra starts would be said to have an effect on a given category if there was a significant shift away from 50% wins, 50% losses.  If half the time you won and half the time you lost a given category when doing something, it makes sense that that something would really not have an effect on how well you do in that category.
So as you can see, when you went over the limit and your opponent did not, you won or tied Ks and Wins much more often than you lost (75 and 68.5%, respectively), meaning that the extra starts definitely strongly affected these two categories.  However, these extra wins did not seem to come at any cost, as I had initially predicted.  Teams that trotted out all of these extra starters did not sacrifice any of their relief efforts, and the ERA and WHIP remained steady in the face of so many extra innings pitched.
So it seemed like Ks and Wins were the only category that were responsive to these extra starts.  To confirm this, I normalized these categories and saw what the effects were.  I thought it unfair to simply cut out the best performance or the last pitching performance of the week, so I simply found what the average start of the week was for these teams and averaged them over 8 starts.  As expected, Ks and Wins fell into more randomized ratios, where teams won half their games.  


Indeed, had these people followed the rules as they were, they would have given up a bunch of wins.
All of this got me thinking about the effect of extra starts.  Indeed, it seems like if you start more guys, you get better results.  However, if you stay under the 8 start limit, is there anything wrong with that?



Apparently, the winning strategy is just to load up on starting pitching.  The more starters that you trot on out there, the greater the chance of you winning those critical quantitative pitching categories, and seemingly, there is no detriment to the average pitching categories.  Indeed, it is questionable whether having extra bench hitters to fill in on those Mondays and Thursdays will have nearly the benefit of having an extra starter, regardless of quality.  Even if you say that more starters means less quality, you will still be able to rack up those innings and absorb a bad pitching outing more easily than if you had pitched fewer innings.  
One of the interesting conclusions that I came to when looking at this data was that these extra starts are often accumulated at the ends of the weeks, after you already know what your pitching line will look like.  If you had stunk up the joint and your WHIP and ERA is already raising the roof, and not in a good way, or that your opponent's is, then it is very easy to push those starters out there to get Ks and Wins without worrying too much about their actual performance.  I think that we have all been in the odd position when you are happier to have a guy hit a homer than to ground out, simply because you already have sealed up that category.
In the end, I agree with the decision made by the commish and support further the notion that we should just drop all upper pitching limits.  We always make the decision of whether the extra Ks or Wins will be worth the chance of giving up a million more runs, the only crux is that at the end of the week, these averages all set up and the team that is ahead in ERA and WHIP has much more to risk by sacrificing one precious move, a player who they probably wanted to keep, and the sanctity of those low average categories for the marginal benefit of beating your opponent in those two critical quantitative categories.   We may think that it is cheap for a guy who has a 6 ERA and a 2 WHIP on Saturday to pick up a bunch more guys to win Ks and Wins, but it is in fact the same calculated risk we all make except for the fact that a bad outing will not be nearly as detrimental.  Hindsight is 20-20, and most of these decisions are made on the cost-benefit analysis that we all run before the starts.  It seems like you simply have to make the decision that we all knew intrinsically, that you will be getting a few extra Ks and possibly a win, but you are running the risk of a bad outing.