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To me, there's a difference between giving up on a prospect and cutting them to make space for others and leveraging a struggling prospect while they still have value.
If I have a prospect that doesn't hold much trade value (i.e. he isn't in the top 200), but he has org value (a usable bat at a SS or C, a potential starter, etc.) I will usually keep them on my propsect shortlist, check up on them and manually manage their strategy and development until they are 25. If they still stumble in AA at that age, I'll give them back to the AI and possibly try to recycle them into younger propsects or keep them as depth if they serve a purpose. Depth in the minors is useful to insure your teams don't have a 0.200 winning percentage year after year.
If a prospect holds a lot of value, I will be a lot quicker to leverage them for usable major league pieces with a lot of control or more advanced prospects if they flounder. This is especially true of pitchers, international free agents or high school draft picks. Especially if you play a small market team, there's a lot value in leveraging the farm system for cheap controllable assets since you can't extend your core every year if everyone hits arb at the same time, let alone participate in FA for star players. I define floundering as follows :
- For pitchers, if their WHIP and FIP- still suck after 3 years of rookie ball for HS/IFA or 2 years of A/A+ ball for college draftees. For IFA, the leash can even be shorter since these players are so far away from the majors.
- For hitters, if their WRC is still very low (70 or below) after the same amount of time and/or they haven't developed any power and/or their plate skills still suck (K% higher than 35%).
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