I'm sure I'm going to get a bunch of "who cares...it's the minor leagues" responses, but I'll risk it anyway.

Does it annoy anyone else when you play teams doing what I call "thinning" their minor league rosters? I mean to the point of have only 8 position players on a High A roster so a pitcher is always the DH or even in the field. I understand it can be a pain to fill out 4 (5 with RL after the draft) minor league rosters, but I also feel it is cheating the game in a way by not filling out each squad to 25 players.

So have at it. Am I a jerk for expecting people to at least attempt to make it look good in minors? (i.e. don't have 6 DH's on your roster and play them in CF, RF, LF, 3B, etc). Or should I just scream "get off my lawn" and be done with it?

You have a right to be annoyed. Honestly, if you are in world that is letting this happen without consequence, I would recommend finding a better world and jumping ship. This is a sign of a poorly ran world.

Even though I don't give a chit about my lower level minors on how they perform. I always keep them stocked with plenty of players. The league should require it.

Thanks Strikeout...I think that's what it may come down to. I hate doing it because I like to help being a stable owner, but I've been through 2 mergers and now an owner swap and I'm not real happy with either league. Season just started in one so I'll stick it out and then move on.

Thanks guys.

Posted by strikeout26 on 9/23/2018 9:53:00 PM (view original):
You have a right to be annoyed. Honestly, if you are in world that is letting this happen without consequence, I would recommend finding a better world and jumping ship. This is a sign of a poorly ran world.

While players should make the effort to fill out their minors, it's hardly the sign of a poorly run world.

I disagree. If you have zeroed out MiLB teams and minor league teams without enough players to fill a roster, you have an issue with the world. Show me a team in Coop like that or any other successful world.

Posted by Jtpsops on 9/24/2018 9:55:00 AM (view original):

Posted by strikeout26 on 9/23/2018 9:53:00 PM (view original):
You have a right to be annoyed. Honestly, if you are in world that is letting this happen without consequence, I would recommend finding a better world and jumping ship. This is a sign of a poorly ran world.

While players should make the effort to fill out their minors, it's hardly the sign of a poorly run world.

No. maybe not. But then again you run a 1st baseman at SS for your AA team......

I prefer worlds that pay attention to the minors. Some worlds like Kinsella actually have a minor league min. win requirement (MWR) with financial penalties. Others require maintaining the minors in their world rules. In Moonlight Graham, we have a Commissioner's Award for the best minor league franchise at the all-star break.

While HBD could do a variety of things to become more realistic (e.g. update the CBA, get ballparks from this decade), realism also improves when the minors are played as intended. It doesn't take much time or salary to fill rosters and trot out teams that win ~40% of the time. When owners do not stock pitching staffs appropriately, we get ridiculous scoring games that drive up ABs, requiring others to overspend for fatigued position players to make up for those underinvesting in pitching. That's why I monitor that in our worlds.

Playing position players drastically out of position is just laziness. It's harder to police, though -- the best approach is probably through a minor league MWR.

Great points Opie, I know it's hard to find 30 dedicated owners that will take the time to run their minor league teams 100% of the time. And I'm not even asking for that. We have a High A team in one of my leagues that has *5* position players TOTAL on his roster.

It's isn't everyone (clearly) that does this, but I find many times it is the guy who is running a high ML payroll and is trying to cut costs by having the minimum amount of players on their MiL rosters.

Looks like I'll be a free agent after this season is done. Too bad we are barely started.

What you will find is the folks who would defend this are the very ones who run poor farm systems...

Actually most of the time the owners doing this are trying to cut costs not because they're running a high payroll, but because they're saving their payroll and prospect money to go after International Free Agents. They're also not signing their draft picks.

Posted by Vitamin_C on 9/26/2018 7:18:00 PM (view original):
What you will find is the folks who would defend this are the very ones who run poor farm systems...

Exactly.

Another sign of a poor is when you have owners that say "it's his team, he can do what he wants with it" or "he paid his money, he can run it how he wants." Those are the worlds that have 120+ win teams and take 2 months to fill.