Personally I think that the AI cheats in the name of balance - in order to keep all of the season totals looking reasonable, I would imagine that there is some element of code that kicks in from time to time to help regress some of the numbers back to the mean. Often this means that the AI "cheats" in the player's favour, but it's the times that it "cheats" against the player that stick in the craw and tempt the Ctrl-Alt-Del ragequit!
In my current playthrough, I was trying very hard to play every game and avoid ragequitting, but sometimes the balancing / cheating is just too outrageous:
I replaced my starter, who was in the middle of a season where he was selected for the all-star game, in the 4th inning after he'd given up 8 runs, 6 of them earned. Pretty bad day, but that happens. My opponent then continued hitting the snot out off every pitch and beat up my bullpen to the tune of scoring another 6 runs over the next 2 innings. That had me annoyed, but again **** happens, and trying to manage an overtaxed bullpen through the next few games is part of the challenge of everyday playing. At the same time this was happening though, the starting pitcher for my opponent had a no-hitter going through 7 innings! For those things to happen in the same game was pretty unbelievable. Considering that it was a 1 star pitcher who'd played mostly at AAA level, and had a career ERA over 7.00 my reaction was at WTF levels! I finally Ctrl-Alt-Del ragequit in the bottom of the 7th when the following happened: Their lead-off man hit a routine grounder to my sure-handed 2nd baseman, who muffed it. He advanced to 2nd on a pick-off error. He advanced to 3rd on a balk, and then he scored on a wild pitch! That was the straw that broke the camel's back!
Unfortunately having ragequit one game it's suddenly too easy to do it again, and I found myself doing it this morning after 3 batters, and my reaction to seeing all 3 get extra base hits was just "Nope!"
I <3 this game, but you need the serenity of a saint to get through a full season of playing every game without rage-quitting!
