Is Sparky in love with '89 Randy Milligan for some reason? :D

I've had two managerial decisions that I'm puzzled by in the past couple days, and I'm trying to figure out why these things happened (and how to prevent the first one from happening again).

1) In a recent game, Milligan pinch hit for my SS in the 9th inning. I do have a backup SS (Randy Velarde), but he was playing 3B. I had a player on my bench (Carlos Martinez) who plays 3B. Why did Sparky decide to play Milligan (a player with a D- range setting at 1B and no other positional eligibility) at SS instead of moving Velarde to SS and bringing in Martinez to play 3B?

*** I just did the math, and evidently he was at 94% with an auto-rest of 95% ***

I can now sort of see the logic here. If Sparky is told he can't use players below his auto-rest percentage, that makes sense. However, I've had guys below their auto-rest percentage PH before. Can anyone give any insight into this?

2) It's the top of the 8th inning. The game is tied 1-1. I have runners on 1st and 3rd. Sparky brings in Milligan to pinch hit for Jack Clark against a LHP. Both Clark and Milligan bat right-handed.

I presume a tie game in the 8th qualifies as late and close. Jack Clark is listed above Randy Milligan in both contact and power for late/close situations. (They are 6/7 for power and 1/2 for contact vs. LHP.) Milligan is above Clark in the "other" list.

Any clue what happened here? I can see three possibilities:

a) For some reason a tie game in the 8th is not considered late/close.
b) Milligan does have a higher real-life batting average than Clark, and Sparky decided to use that as the criteria in this specific situation.
c) Clark started the game at 97%, while Milligan was at 100%. There has to be a formula where expected performance is impacted by fatigue -- is that formula applied when making PH decisions?

Thoughts?

1) I'm surprised to hear sparky is using players below their auto-rest percentage as pinch hitters. That shouldn't be happening.

2) B is what likely happened here. My understanding for pinch hitting is, if the sim determines pinch hitting is a possibility, it looks at the hierarchy and then inserts the first guy it finds who it deems to be an improvement over the current hitter. Putting Clark over Milligan in the hierarchies won't stop Milligan from coming in for Clark. It would mean that if both are on the bench and a pitcher or other scrub was batting, Clark would go in first.

I would suggest making Clark ineligible to be pinch hit for in the advanced settings or lowering the pinch hit frequency below 3, if you feel Sparky is pinch hitting too often.

1) I saw it two or three times with 1980 Mike Davis in the most recent iteration of the Tag Team league. It's possible I had changed his auto-rest threshold from the default, but that's something I rarely do for hitters.

2) That's interesting insight - I thought Sparky enforced the hierarchy when making PH decisions, not just used it to decide which pinch hitters to use.in a given situation.

I've actually got PH set to 4 - Sparky generally does a pretty good job handling that, and I tend to run multiple platoons on my teams. In the end it was just a marginal difference at best between them....it just surprised me.