Will a ML bench coach with an 80 fielding iq rating have the same affect in my franchise as a fielding instructor with an 80 fielding iq?

No.

The FI affects all levels of your franchise.  He's most important for the defensive development of your younger prospects, the ones down in the lowest minor league levels who have the most potential for growth.

The impact of the ML BC for anything, beyond when the ML manager gets ejected from a game, is questionable at best.  If he has any impact at all on ML players development, it would be as a small influence on top of the primary coaches for each discipline (hitting, pitching, fielding, base running).

Just out of curiosity, has anybody ever tried getting a top dollar ML bench coach and setting the argumentative setting to high so that the manager gets kicked out of games more and the bench coach gets to take over?  I doubt I'd ever even think about doing this, just curious if anyone has and what kind of results they saw.

No, I can't believe anyone would think that as a viable strategy.

I think it WIS said in the rules or in a dev chat that teams get a shortterm boost if the manager gets tossed out.  Seems like an odd thing to program, but maybe it's real. So setting argument to high might be strategy.

Posted by tufft on 2/6/2013 8:53:00 PM (view original):
I think it WIS said in the rules or in a dev chat that teams get a shortterm boost if the manager gets tossed out.  Seems like an odd thing to program, but maybe it's real. So setting argument to high might be strategy.

But then, the rest of the game is managed by the bench coach.  I'm assuming that all your settings on the Managerial Settings page are then disregarded for the remainder of the game.