Fair playing time, checked for you
Set your team’s rules once. Dugout Relief checks every lineup against them, rotates the bench, catcher, and pitcher, and shows who’s behind on field time. You choose the final lineup.
Set up once, checked every inning
On the Team tab, pick your sport, your division, and how many innings a game lasts. Mark each player’s positions: Ready where they can play, Preferred where they’re one of the players you’d like. It isn’t a ranking. You can also set a default batting order and field positions.
The lineup checks then look at every inning. They flag a player who sits two innings in a row, a player with fewer than two innings in the field, a player in two positions at once, or a position left empty.
A starting lineup, then your changes
Build Lineup fills each inning from the players who are here. It looks at your saved games, so the players who sat most, and the ones who haven’t caught or pitched yet this season, get their turn. Players go only where they’re Ready or Preferred, unless no one can cover a spot, and the checks say so. With Rotate positions on (Minors and Majors start with it on), players move through every spot they’re Ready for, so they learn more of the field; Preferred only breaks ties. Off, Preferred players get their spots first.
Change any spot. The checks update as you go and say when a move breaks one of your rules. Build Lineup doesn’t rate players or choose by ability, and it doesn’t look at batting or pitching stats.
Who is behind on field time
You don’t have to keep a tally. A player whose field innings a game are well below the team average gets a Behind tag next to their name in the lineup: after two or more games, more than half an inning a game under the team average. Only the games a player was there for count, so a missed game never puts them behind. If today’s lineup has them sitting more than a teammate, the checks say so, with their innings per game next to the team’s. Swap them in for an inning they sit, and the checks update. Build Lineup never sits a player tagged Behind twice while a teammate sits less, even when that puts one teammate off their positions list for an inning. The checks show that one too.
Mark a game as a playoff or tournament game on the Schedule, and its innings stay out of season playing time. In that game no one is tagged Behind, and Build Lineup puts competitiveness ahead of rotation: Preferred positions first, and the bottom of the batting order sits first. Everyone still plays two innings and no one sits twice in a row.
The numbers behind the tag
The playing time card shows each player’s innings in the field, pitching, catching, in the infield, and in the outfield this season. It counts the games before the one you have open, so an older game shows the season as it stood that day.
The counts come from saved lineups and imported stats. If players moved during a game, check its positions on the Schedule; checked positions count over the scorekeeper’s.
Innings, not outs
Little League asks for six defensive outs. The fielding check counts innings, and treats two innings in the field as about the same. What the app assumes
For the exact mandatory-play rule, check the Little League Rulebook app (opens in a new tab) and your league’s rules.
The batting order
Suggest order can rotate the last game’s batting order, moving the top three to the bottom. With imported stats, it can also put table setters first, then sluggers, or the highest OPS (on-base plus slugging) first. It only changes the batting order, and it’s a draft: move anyone anywhere.
Everyone bats by default. For an older team that bats 9, turn on 9 batters in Team setup: the first 9 start, the rest are substitutes, and Build Lineup keeps the 9 in the field. Where mandatory play applies (every division but Senior), it puts each substitute in for the last 2 innings. Substitutes sit by design, so no one is marked Behind on field time.
What it leaves out
It doesn’t rate players or sort them into tiers. Fairness follows your rules, and the app shows its work.