If you spent several of your early round draft choices on stud pitchers, you can stop reading now. If you drafted like me, you have one or two stud pitchers, two closers, and five middle-of-the-road starters. You have two choices – you can sit on your five marginal starters or you can establish a plan to maximize innings. I implemented an approach to maximizing innings last year and plan to do so again in 2008.

My objective over the season is to maximize wins and strikeouts by piling up starts/innings without killing your ERA and WHIP. I found it very effective in the NFBC last year during the first half of the season, to acquire one or two two-start pitchers each week then cut them the next week. So you take two roster spots and continually rotate the players.

While this method worked effectively enough to help me finish third in my league last season, there are two problems I did run into using this method. The first is that you can cut a pitcher after his two-start week that turns into a stud for the rest of the season. I did that with Shaun Marcum last year. The second problem is that by the All-star break, all of the reasonable double-start pitchers were already on rosters.

This past week, among the double start pitchers available in most NFBC leagues were: Mark Hendrickson, Nelson Figueroa, Kyle Kendrick, Armando Galarraga, and Kason Gabbard. As of this instant, I would not want to rely on any of these starters for the whole season. But for this week, I am willing to take a chance on two of them. Double up my chance for a win, hopefully get 12 innings pitched out of each, with eight or nine strikeouts. All without getting ERA-killed or WHIP-killed.

Greg Smith from the A’s was effective for me in the double-start role last week. I acquired him for only $11 and he produced 12 innings, one win, and eight strikeouts with an ERA of 3.00 and WHIP of 1.167. Exactly what I am looking for. Now he will be cut for one of this week’s double-starters with the hopes of duplicating the results.