[atl_braves]

I don't care about the advantage (as you said, it's tiny anyway), just the realism. Guys with 10+ years of service time and multiple years remaining on their contracts shouldn't be getting outrighted to AAA.

There is a mechanism to prevent this from happening (players can force the team's hand by refusing a demotion), but in my experience, it has never worked for CPU-controlled teams. That I've gotten the "this player refuses to be demoted" message a nonzero amount of times shows that the feature can work, I've just never seen it work for CPU teams.