Hey folks,

I've got a few newbie questions. The first concerns something I read somewhere when first signing up and, despite searching around for a half an hour, can not find now. I read somewhere that you need extra inactive pitchers on your minor league rosters to eat up innings. I recall seeing a recommendation for 5-6 in the low minors with only 1-2 extra in AAA, and somewhere in between for the mid-minors. Does my memory serve me correctly on this? If so, how crucial is it? Must I manage my young pitchers' innings increases and limit them? (If so, what is a reasonable workload increase per year?) Any recommendations here would be most valued.

Also, I just wanted to ask how important various ratings are in assessing players. Is the overall value important or can it be overlooked in favour of other ratings? How crucial is ground ball/fly ball ratio for pitchers? Are righty/lefty skills (in either pitchers or batters) as important as things like batting/power or control/velocity? How important are individual pitch skills? I presume thay all work in tandem, but my question can be boiled down to, what are the most crucial things to look for/where do you place greatest emphasis in evaluating players?

Thanks in advance and good luck to you all in the upcoming season!

1) The younger your players are, the less durability/stamina they have. So, you need more arms to compensate for this. The recommendations seem pretty accurate. You dont have (you can if you want) to micro-manage your MiLB if you don't want to. Simmy does a pretty good job shuffling players to the active, inactive lists. Just check in periodically, because sometimes he will leave good prospects inactive even if they have fully recovered.

2) Overall means nothing when evaluating talent. The only thing that it makes a difference in is the amount that they will demand when they go to arbitration. As for as individual skills go, that is up to you to figure what is most important. Every player values each skill differently. With that said, I think that the one general concensus is that splits (lefty/righty skills) are the most important with righty carrying the most wait.

To add to trojan's 2nd point, there are scads of archived threads which go into great detail on the whole question of player evaluation. Sometimes can take awhile to find exactly what you are looking for, but worth the effort.

One other tip, look at successful veteran players in your world and see what traits they have in common.

To add to #1.. In the minors you can let a young pitcher pitch as many innings as he is capable of.  It isnt like real life where you want to pace a young pitcher and only allow him to throw so many innings a year.  His durability and stamina will determine how many innings he can pitch naturally by how often he is fatigued, but if you have a pitcher who is 100 then by all means let him pitch, you dont need to stop him at X innings in a year.

Posted by oriolemagic on 7/18/2010 7:10:00 PM (view original):
To add to #1.. In the minors you can let a young pitcher pitch as many innings as he is capable of.  It isnt like real life where you want to pace a young pitcher and only allow him to throw so many innings a year.  His durability and stamina will determine how many innings he can pitch naturally by how often he is fatigued, but if you have a pitcher who is 100 then by all means let him pitch, you dont need to stop him at X innings in a year.

I tend to try and find guys who have Stamina in the 80/90s just for my minor league teams and have them just eat up innings two/three days in a row to rest my bullpen.