Should I expect a prospect's potential to eventually fall? It seems like my best prospects always start out with say 4 stars potential but they will inevitably plateau at 3 stars or less. I play minor leaguers in spring training and if they do well I call them up from time to time to perform in the majors. My current CF prospect Mike Turner is a 2 star player but has always been predicted to be a 4 star player. Over the course of this season he hit well in the minors and played in 47 major league games where he hit .240 and slugged .407 with 5 home runs. Not too bad, but then I notice at the end of the season his potential has dropped all the way to three stars. I have noticed this pattern on a majority of my good prospects. Granted, I've never had a top 10 prospect in my system, so am I just seeing the norm as far as prospects go? Will a player rarely meet their predicted potential? With Mike Turner, I had planned to bring him into my starting lineup this year (he's 24, played for 3 years in the minors). Did bringing him to the majors for 47 games impact his development? Should I have left him in the minors, and should I send him back to the minors this year? I have a starting pitcher in a similar situation. I had to reach into my minor leagues for my 5 starter last season, he is a 1.5 star player projected to be 3.5. He had an okay season with a 4.92 ERA and a 9-8 record, but now I'm scared if I leave him in as a starter this year he will lose potential and he will flat-line at 2 stars since he's stayed one whole year at 1.5. I guess my ultimate question here is: will a player reach his max potential in the minors, and should I call them up before they reach that max potential?
My other question pertains "auto-resolve" and play by play games. I love to play through the actual games. Usually I will just click "at-bat" but I've been getting better at doing pitch-by-pitch as well. Occasionally I'll just sim through a few games if I feel I am out of rhythm and am losing games that I over-manage. Often I find the most winning strategy is to simulate a half-inning when I am up at bat and then do at-bat or pitch-by-pitch for when I am pitching so that I can manage the bullpen myself. I always just seem to have more luck when I do half-inning for offense. Is there a real difference between going at-bat by at-bat when you are hitting vs. simulating the inning? I guess I want to know more about what the computer is deciding to do when I click "at-bat," since it's actually a button I rely on a lot. And like I said, I love playing the games through, so it isn't as fun when I have to go back and read what my team accomplished on offense. That being said, I have plenty of games where I just destroy the other team and I play through every at-bat, so maybe it's all perceptual and it's just that baseball makes no sense sometimes and you never know what's going to happen
Those are my main questions. I accidentally went into too much detail earlier and wrote about my experience with the game thus far if anyone is interested:
My first team was the Eugene Redwoods, and I played in a fictional league with the same structure as the MLB but with team names and places that I picked. I loved my players and loved playing through each game and trying to apply my own strategy to what is otherwise a simulated game. My rivalries with the Milstead Soyfields and the Carlsbad Crawfish were epic and I had a future hall of famer Sergio Perez lead me to some great seasons. However, I fell into some bad habits as the Commisioner and I began to drastically overspend on free agents every year as well as force trades that were heavily in my favor. I let Perez go after his nine year contract was over and he was 37. He wanted 40 million a year for five more years and I said no. Little did I know he would go to my rivals the Crawfish and absolutely rake until he retired at age 42, including multiple victories over me in the postseason. I played for a while after that trying to learn the farm system better, but I felt pretty lost, and the decisions I had made to trade away prospects for stars had left my minor league teams with a handful of 1 star players. I knew then that my cheating had ultimately failed. I decided to abandon that league and start another fictional league. Now I play as the Houston Galaxy and I've played through 5 seasons and done well. I do raise my budget to be equal to a big market but I don't fix injuries (although I turned them down a notch), and I definitely don't overspend on free agents and stay under whatever budget I set. In my previous fictional league I learned the hard way that overspending to field a super-team sapped a lot of the strategy out of the game as well as leaving me hamstrung, and I think I'm learning a lot about how to play through the games. However, the reason I am making this post is because I do still have questions about the difference between playing through games versus simulating them, and the best way to develop minor league players. Thanks for your time!