Help? Computer Run Teams Keeping Stars in Minors?
 

Created a new baseball league with 36 teams. Dumped all the players from MLB, Japan, Korea, etc. in & help a FA Draft. Took quite a bit of time between the setup and finding appropriate logos/uniforms.

Now that the season is about to start, I have found that many of the computer controlled teams are leaving legit stars in the minors, in favor of scrubs. (Stanton, Arenado, Severino, ... to name a few.)

I tried to run the Computer AI option to optimize the teams, but it doesn't change anything. Please, someone, any suggestions? I'm a longtime OOTP user, but usually just play through MLB seasons. This is maybe my second true attempt at a fictional league, and I'd hate to have wasted all the time on the setup only to have the fun drained out by unrealistic rosters moves.

Thanks in advance for any help!

One could argue that this is actually pretty realistic. How long did Vlad Jr. spend in the minors this year? Not sure what starting a new league does to service time for players but if it resets them all to 0, there is a little incentive to keep them down for at least a few weeks.

Yes, as mentioned above, this is intentional to mirror what real life teams do with players without service time. Once you pass the cutoff point where players can accrue enough for a full year of service time, the teams will start bringing these guys up.

If it is that, you can also potentially change your league service time rules. Teams will only keep guys down if they're withing 20 or 30 days of the yearly service limits, so if you change it to be like 90 days = 1 year of service, then they'll probably call them up right away since they're "too far" away to keep them down for that long.

Ahhhhh. That was it! I changed it to one day of service needed, after saving the file, just to see if that was the problem. Simmed a few days ahead and they're all up. Thanks, guys, ... I NEVER would've thought of that.

Follow up question? What would be a good workaround? If I made it 1 day, and then changed it back to 172 (or whatever) later in the season, would that effectively fix the problem? Or would that screw everything up?

I would suggest changing it to like 90 days. As I said, they only keep guys down if they're within like 20-30 days, and once players have some service in the season, they skip that other check (so that they don't send guys down to gain time).

And that way, if you do want to change back from 90 to 172, it's a less jarring gap and less likely to screw up. Going from 1 day to 172 has a chance that things could really blow up (ie. guys somehow getting like 30 years of service counted).