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This has been argued to death on various baseball forums, but the question is a loaded one, considering the tiredness factors in PureSim. I go with four starters (in an old-time 154-game schedule), BUT, I have at least two guys that can start in a pinch.

Just look at the real-life stats -- apart from the deadball era, there's no team that used four guys consistently. There was almost always a fifth/sixth spot starter.

Has the term "spot starter" simply become unfashionable?

Now -- there's no reason in the world that a decent starter can't pitch once every four days. Given that very few guys complete many games, the reasoning behind a fifth starter gets even more baffling.

Surely no one will say that pitchers used to be better than they are now, will they ? [;)]

It's all about the greenbacks. Someone reasoned that pitching these guys 200 innings per year instead of 300 keeps them around longer.

Shortly after the onset of guaranteed, multi-million dollar contracts, pitchers began to experience newer and longer-lasting injuries. Why go out there and pitch at all when you can be disabled and treated, while STILL drawing that fat paycheck?

The term "sore arm" was removed from the baseball vocabulary. Every condition now had a name and a surgery or treatment to correct it.

Doctors and trainers then became much more important to a baseball team. New types of surgeries and treatments were developed. The word rehab began to mean something other than recovery from drug or alcohol abuse.

This Cuban guy named Canseco came along, went 40/40, then......aaaaah...it's late. Good night.

I think the big thing now is that pitchers cost more now days than they did in our hey day. Management doesn't want to lose/waste the money. Paul Richards wasted/ended pitchers careers every where he went.
Don

Putting aside real life for a minute and concentrating on the game, its a mixed bag. In the XIBL, the first season I took over a team, we had 2 really good starters and 2 that were good but not great. However, the middle relievers seemed to get shelled more times than not, so about a 1/4 of the way through the season I swiched from a 5 man rotation to a 4 man. We ended up winning the division, and had alot of complete games. I tried to use the relievers as little as possible. For that season it worked out well.

However, because the league has a salary cap and we were pretty snug up against it, if an injury happened to one of those pitchers (which thankfully it didnt) I would have been sunk. The quality of pitchers in the minors just was not good enough for them to play in the majors yet, and signing a free agent was out of the question. I think I was walking on the edge for that season. This past season, my starters werent nearly as good as the year before, and still no one in the minors was ready to move up, so I went back to the 5 man rotation, where I could get more use out of the relievers that were probably just as good as my 3/4/5 starters, but with less endurance.

So I think the depth of the team at pitching has to play a factor in it. With the 4 man rotation, more innings means more chances for injuries. If you have a couple of decent backup starters, then yeah Id do the 4 man rotation again for sure. If there is no one to fill the spot if someone goes down, then I would probably look at getting some decent relievers, and go back to the 5 man rotation

Im not so sure I explain the second paragraph correctly, so let me try to do that. It sounded kind of weird the way I worded it. The reason I went from a 4 man to 5 man rotation even though my starters werent as good as previously is because 1)I didnt want to risk the injuries to the good starters when they got more innings, and 2) because my 3/4/5 guys werent as good, they tended to get pulled after less innings, and then the decent relievers I had took over for them, where as when I had the 4 man rotation, I tried to get every last inning I possibly could out of them, at the expense of possibly greater injury risk

Im still not sure if that made sense, but I think you understand what Im getting at

Is a Spot Starter the same as a Long Reliever? I have one pitcher that is classified as Spot Starter / Middle Relief. I guess that means he can relieve any where capably. I'm using a 4 man rotation (with modern closer ) in my 1900 association. My pitchers rarely get tired during a game, and are usually ready to go again 2 days later. There are very few pitchers classified as relievers, as well. It makes things interesting.