[Syd Thrift]

One thing I think that should be coded into the game fairly hard is that the AI should basically never be starting someone rated lower than, say, 35/80 at shortstop or centerfield (and arguably C) under any circumstance. If the choice is between a 25/80 guy who rakes and a 60/80 guy who will probably hit .160 in the majors, it should choose the latter. If it has to move guys all over the field (or, again, make otherwise strange call-ups from the minors) in order to ensure that at least passable fielders are playing SS and CF, it needs to do that. To some extent I think 2B and even 3B a little should also have some sort of scale but not as drastic. If you're going to put in guys who are learning the position on the job or are rated like 25/80, those players should be playing 1B or corner outfield.

This isn't just about whether or not a given player is detrimental to their team overall: I'm sure that in some scenarios, playing a guy at shortstop who can barely field it but who can OPS over 1.000 there might very well lead to more wins than the good-field, no-hit guy. This is about the way managers in Major League Baseball work. By and large, they manage to not get fired far, far more than they manage in order to maximize potential outcomes. One big way they get fired is to have a glaring hole on the roster that they choose not to address. The second they lose for, like, any reason, the local (and today, the national) media and "hot take" crowd point to the hole as the reason because the hole is very, very obvious, and it's embarrassing to the manager and the team as a whole, and not only can it lead to a manager losing his job, even if the reasons why the team is underperforming are completely unrelated to that hole, it can make it much, much harder for them to get another job in the future because they're not thinking the way a "proper" manager should. So in a sense, even if a directive came down from on high that Jeff Bagwell is now the starting SS, a manager might actually resign before doing so, lest he get his own reputation tarnished (and TBF any manager fired for a reason so dumb would get picked up by another team in a second).

I've talked in the past about giving managers "bad boy" points a la Europa Universalis. While, okay, that's not going to get implemented, the next best thing is to try to get the AI to think in these terms. Sure, it means that savvy players might have more room to exploit market inefficiences. I feel like that's kind of why a lot of people play the game, to prove that they're smarter than the average GM/manager, but besides that it should add that extra wrinkle when, as a GM, you trade for one of those no-glove, good-hit middle infielders and your manager refuses to look like a fool and play them in that slot. Baseball is a very tradition-heavy game, and there are a lot of things you just don't question.

Also of course in OOTP defense, especially defense up the middle, means a looooooot. Like, over the course of a full season that .160 hitting SS with an averagish 60/80 rating at the position (yeah, I know that technically 45 is average but the game makes the "average" determination based on a lot of guys who are theoretically rated to play a given position, not the median actual starter as you might see in real life baseball) might actually be worth more wins than a guy who OPSes 1.000 with a 25/80 rating. CF is almost as extreme, and catcher can be fairly extreme too with the caveat that you won't necessarily see low C ability show up in their own fielding stats but in the K and BB rates of the pitchers they handle.