[Leo_The_Lip]

I have yet to find a way to do this despite trying many strategies and clicking on every thing I can find. You can check a box to never pinch-hit for a guy, but you can't prevent a pinch runner or defensive replacement from taking him out off the field.

Even worse is the situation I find in my current game. My starting third baseman is coming off a gold glove and triple crown year and continuing to hit. Most of my outfielders have gone down to injury, so I put him in LF where he is slightly below average, and use a defensively adequate decent bat at third.

So what does the AI do in late innings? It sends in a great defender to play LF, but instead of moving the emergency LFer back to third where he is the best glove on the team and would improve the defense, it takes out the best hitter in baseball and sends him to an early shower. The next inning the ordinary fielder is replaced at third with a better, but not as good as the triple crown winner, fielder.

As I have pointed out in the past, OOTP needs an algorithm to compute the overall defensive impacts before it assigns positions. Currently the AI makes very sub-optimal decisions, often leaving players where they are poor defenders when simply swapping them would greatly improve the defense.