365 noob pitching staff - thoughts?/corrections?

Rotation: S9*/S9*/S8*/S8*/ - fifth is S7/R4 - a quality arm intended to be used only in the bullpen

Bullpen: S7/R4 plus R4/R4/R3/R3
I have a dedicated closer, so I'm trying to find out if this is the best way to use my best arm (the s/r guy):

Closer - is an ideal closer/setup guy (Elroy Face)
Of the other 4:
best arm (the s/r guy) - middle/setup
next best arm - setup/closer
3rd best arm - middle
weakest arm - mopup

is this the best way to get that s/r fifth starter (who will never start) the most innings in relief?

Can you post a link to your team? Also... (if it's an ATG9 league) you'll get more responses if you put this in the All-Time Greats section.

need to see a link to the team, and need to know if this is a dh league or not - but in general if you have 4 *starters you don't want to spend real money on a 5th one. having a starter rating will make the card more expensive therefore you will get less bang for your buck using him as a reliever. if you really like the guy use him as a starter and use a 5-man rotation.

a common rookie mistake is treating your stratomatic pitching staff the way one would treat a real life one. for better or worse, this world is very different.

many thanks for the thoughts and suggestions - have not created the team yet, so no link -

Like tmfw30 said, you're paying extra for the S7 rating with the S7/R4 option. Have your 5th starter cost 50 cents. He won't be used.

Closer - is an ideal closer/setup guy (Elroy Face) - Yup
Of the other 4:
best arm (the s/r guy) - middle/setup - Yup. Gets the most innings from your best RP. RP only guy though.
next best arm - setup/closer - You can't have 3 setup RP's so I would do ...middle/behind and late.
3rd best arm - middle - the 2 middle slots are taken so ...behind and late/tied and late.
weakest arm - mopup - Yup

This is what I do in the 20xx game. RP's in ATG don't have a closer rating so I'm kinda out of my element. Is Face a good closer? Should you have a 2nd closer in ATG? I don't know. As jjii66 suggested, I'll copy this to the ATG Forum and we can see what they think.

ATG doesn't use "closer" ratings, so none of those C numbers matter in the least.

Generally speaking, I try to spend about 25% of my salary cap on SP, and keep the bullpen to 10%, allocating the remaining 65% to hitting.

You can use either 4 SP* with a 0.50 filler in the 5 slot OR you can use 5 non-* SP. The non-* pitchers are, inning-for-inning, a better value than the SP*, but they pitch every 5th day instead of every 4th. It really doesn't matter, but you can mess around with it forever and find a group that works well for you. Pay attention to your stadium. Pitchers with high HR chances on their card will get killed in high HR stadiums; but they would be fine in a place like Braves 1/1/1/1. Pay attention to the source of on base % too. Pitchers with high walks on their cards, but low singles are often a great fit for their salary in a high singles park (Forbes 17/17/1/1). Think someone like Herb Score (7.77M) who has lots of walks and some HR's. He's an excellent option in that stadium.

For RP's, I like to have a good closer, often spending 5% of my salary on a shutdown R1 at the backend of my pen. I do NOT like to spend for the R2/R3+ guys. I find that RP's who can get OUT of innings don't generally need to be more than an R1 to get the job done. A typical bullpen for me will have a quality Closer, and then a couple of extreme split guys 9R/9L or 8R/8L for "specialists" and then a couple of mopup guys for 1M or so that are R3-5 and just absorb innings in blowouts.

Pitching is harder to figure out than hitting. Find a couple SP's you like. Play around with it and tweak your settings to suit. Best of luck!