What to do, what to do, what to do when you get a young stud? Player Profile: Theo Reese - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports

Would he develop as much at the ML as he would in the minors? Remind me how patience works? Is it just a matter of how reasonably quickly the prospect is being promoted? Is it about age, or just player experience? What if a player is 18 and 90 overall? Wouid he grow impatient in anything less than the ML?

And what about player success? If a player is 18 and hitting .420 in High A, does he expect to be promoted right now because he's bored? Or, if a player is 22 with 4 years of experience, will their development slow if they struggle at ML (say they're a fringe AAA/ML guy)?

He'll develop fine in the majors if you play him. He's a LF right now.

Development is powered by playing time, coaching, training and actual potential. I wouldn't worry about any of the other stuff.

You can put him in the ML right away where he will work with the best coaches (In theory). He has a good makeup and at this age, patience won't really be a factor. You can't play him at CF though. He is a LF/1B at best guy right now.

If you keep him in the minors, put him with your best hitting coach regardless of the level. Right now I would platoon him against left handed pitching and keep him on the bench for PH. He will still get his games and plate appearances but it'll keep that ugly 58 VsR from keeping his numbers down.

My best Example of this is Clayton Lincoln.

https://www.whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=7698563

Had a couple of games at age 19. Made the majors full time at age 20, 2 years after being drafted and has never looked back.

These are my personal opinions based on anecdotal observations so take it with a grain of salt.

IMO, unless you really screw up and are keeping guys on the bench in rookie ball for four years with anything less than $20M training, they are probably going to get relatively close to their ceiling in ratings.

Having said that, I'm always looking for an edge, and even +1 across all ratings for your entire ML roster will make a difference over the course of a season. After observing the development patterns of a bunch of prospects, I'm inclined to believe games played is the most important factor in position player development (not sure about pitchers, otherwise I'd put all pitching prospects as SuA). To the point where I try to get all my best prospects on the same minor league team for deep playoff runs to increase their games played as much as possible. I also try to make sure all my good prospects have a player backing them up for rest (with very liberal rest settings, i.e. +/-1 run after 6 or 7 innings) so they can play in every regular season game without getting too low on fatigue by the end of the season.

Forget about stats and actual player performance. IMO there's no way the developers made the code complex enough to penalize players for poor performance as a result of early promotion.

I think coaching is important which is why I keep even 18 y/o's in AA or AAA. But I'm also beginning to think that the returns greatly diminish as long as your coaches meet some hidden minimum requirement. If you are exposing your prospects to better coaching earlier than the rest of the league, your guys should be ahead of the curve.

Again, these are all guesses and I won't argue with anyone who says otherwise since I have no evidence to back it up.

EDIT: And get them in every single ST game.

In this specific case I think I'd be a little more cautious. As said above, Reese is not a CF, and may never have a good enough glove rating to play there constructively. He's better off in LF, and LF tends to be a catch-all position, meaning there are lots of guys that can play LF adequately and hit very well. Depending on the rest of your team, Reese may not be a significant enough upgrade to warrant starting his arb clock a season or so early. It might be wiser to keep him with your better minor league hitting coaches until he develops above whatever else you have in the bigs.

As far as your general promotion questions, I haven't seen any evidence that actual performance matters at all. The only times I've seen lack of promotion matter is retirements at season rollover. I don't even look at the emails I get from my coaches telling me about my prospects' performance.

As to your second question about the 22y/o 4yr pro, unless they're a DITR, development will have slowed noticeably by the end of the fourth pro season no matter what level they're at or what they've done. One of the reasons many owners zero out advanced scouting is that with very few exceptions, prospect development is very very predictable.

I'm sure you know this already but if you're going to bring a hotshot up to the majors, you have to keep giving him full playing time. If you want him to keep developing while he's still capable, don't platoon him or sit him if he struggles.

Last season, first time ever, I put a 21 yr old RF in the majors. Thought long and hard about it, but I had the spot open for him, I needed his power hitting to contend in my division, and I couldn't get excited about spending big on a comparable free agent who'd end up blocking him and my other prospects.

This is gold. Thanks, guys.

That's another question somebody above brought up: does playing a player at less than 100% have negative effects on development?

Posted by ab90 on 1/31/2017 5:10:00 PM (view original):
That's another question somebody above brought up: does playing a player at less than 100% have negative effects on development?

It does if they end up getting injured. Which is more likely with less then 100% health.

Posted by hockey1984 on 1/31/2017 6:58:00 PM (view original):

Posted by ab90 on 1/31/2017 5:10:00 PM (view original):
That's another question somebody above brought up: does playing a player at less than 100% have negative effects on development?

It does if they end up getting injured. Which is more likely with less then 100% health.

But only through injury? I'm weighing the benefits of not having to waste my life monitoring my Low A team with the relatively rarity of injury.

It's not that tight a race.

97% seems to be the "breaking point". I check my minor league teams once a week for fatigue.

Posted by ab90 on 1/31/2017 5:10:00 PM (view original):
That's another question somebody above brought up: does playing a player at less than 100% have negative effects on development?

I've observed that it may possibly impact offseason development of Durability specfically, but I am not 100% sure...

So if you have let's say a Low A OF with let's say 55 Dur, if you play him all 140+ minor league games without concern of %, player will benefit from extra coaching and will gain the most for "learned" attributes (contact, splits, etc), but will finish the season at let's say 75% ... I may have observed that players who finish a season at 75% acquire much less Dur during the offseason training than a player finishing at 100% who has the same/similar current dur + potential dur + training budget. So like 55 dur would only boost to 60-62 instead of 65-70 in the offseason, and multiply this across 3-4 seasons and your final product is only 70-75 dur instead of 80-85-90 dur. This would be the difference between 125 ML games per season as a finished product as opposed to 150 ML games per season as a finished product. So would you rather have 125 games of slightly better talent or 150 games of slightly less talent ... I sometimes observe other teams' low minors to find guys in the 60-70% range at the end of the season to see what happens ... a player such as Player Profile: Fautino Escobar would be a notable example of this effect...