[Déjà Bru]

Any discussion about trading should start with a statement of what the setting is for Trading Difficulty. Now, should this proposal have taken place even on Very Hard setting? Probably not. Still, I would think that on Average or easier, you would not see such lopsided proposals.

Opportunity knocks sometimes. This offer may be the start of true negotiations in that (again, depending on Trade Difficulty), you can start out by dismissing this trade but instead come up with something more reasonable that would benefit both teams.

One more thing: Your perception of Provines and Mochizuki is based on your scout's evaluations (which leads to another question on where you have Scouting Accuracy set). Maybe the AI "thinks" (or knows) that Provines is not as good as you think and that Mochizuki is somewhat underrated by you.

Your guy only has a year-and-a-half in the major leagues, and say your scout's evaluation is right on. Well, Provines is weak on movement (going to give up homers), weak on fielding, and does not hold runners very well. All of those are going to negatively affect his future performance.

Just throwing stuff out there.

EDIT: Interesting that you mentioned the different personalities involved. After all I said above, no, no way I would make this trade. I was just trying to explain why maybe you get such an offer and would believe the AI to be out of whack. But the reason why this is interesting is that the AI is "no dummy" in that it definitely "knows" that Provines would be better for its clubhouse than Mochizuki and that Mochizuki is probably never going to amount to anything because of his bad work ethic. One of the aspects of "more clever AI" in this version (I forget the exact term they used in marketing) is to make your scout oblivious to personality traits while the AI will shun a guy like Mochizuki in trades and in amateur drafts until very late rounds. I have seen this time and again.