I have a player in AAA who I am counting on to fill a whole in my lineup for next year. He's 21 yrs old with 3 yrs experience. As far as his development is concerned, does it matter when I promote him? Will he do better next year if I promote him for the last 20 games of the season this year? Should I make sure that he spends at least 20 games of his 4th season in the minors before being promoted?

I have a feeling that the game has a logic concerning this, but I'm not sure what it is. You vets got this figured out?

If he's going to get ABs, and he's ready for the show, there's no harm in his development to promote him now.

Some might suggest that you can squeeze an extra year at entry-level salary out of him if you don't promote him until 21+ games into next season.

Holding him back allows you to control his salary longer. And, since he's a 3 year pro, he shouldn't be on the 40 yet. Calling him up will burn an option year(if that's a big thing to you).

Since you're not competing for the playoffs, wait the 20-whatever days next season and squeeze an extra year out of him at the minimum wage.

If your AAA team does not make the playoffs, and you dont care too much about the salary thing, it doesnthurt to bring him up this season in September so he can get some more playing time.

If you care about the salary thing you can promote for the last 10-12 games of the ML regular season. Make sure he gets demoted before the ML world series ends, then promote after 21 ML days the following season.

You'll get him a few extra ABs for him at the ML level, he'll start the next season at the AAA salary, when you promote him he'll get the ML salary for only a prorated portion of the season, and the following season he won't accrue a full year. Win, win, win, win.

If he brought him up for 10-12 games this season, doesn't that mean he would need to wait 31-33 days next season?

Quote: Originally posted by shobob on 11/26/2009If he brought him up for 10-12 games this season, doesn't that mean he would need to wait 31-33 days next season?

I haven't confirmed the math (I assume pb did it correctly), but if he has, I think the answer is "no." You need to wait the 20+ games to start a season so that the entire minor league assignment doesn't count towards ML service time (because any assignment less than 20 days results in the entire assignment counting towards ML time). I believe the actual number of non-ML days needed isn't quite as high. Not sure if I explained that well, but I hope it makes sense.

You explained it well.

I believe the total number of days you need to serve in the ML is 172 to register a year. However I'm not sure if that's number of days or games honestly.