Personally I have always felt that a well stocked minor leagues is integral to the overall health of a league. It provides a viable condition in which your legitimate prospects can progress. If there are teams who don't field enough players to sim the games, doesn't that affect those players progress? And wouldn't it skew results so that you are not getting an accurate reading on the progress or real worth of your prospects? A league I am in seems to not care about whether or not teams are stocking their MiL properly. The commissioner called it 'irrelevant' and said he doesn't have the time or inclination to police other peoples MiL. AAMOF, he doesn't think any commish would. There was a team there last year who won 1 game at various MiL levels. I called him out and he added a few players. This year he has the bare minimum number of position players and many are of the DH variety. This is not acceptable to me, so I have asked the commish to replace me. Stocking the minors is a relatively easy and cheap procedure, IMO. And important to the health of a league. Am I making too big a deal about this? I'm curious as to others opinions on this.

Games need to sim. Worrying over fatigued pitching(**** pitchers pitch ****** at 100% and 0%), records, etc, etc, isn't necessary. All you want is to get your players some playing time.

I will say, when someone has a crap minor league system, they usually leave nothing on the farm when they go. That's the one downside of not busting minor league balls as a commish.

The downside to taking care of your minors when others don't is that if you ever need to look for a free agent mid-season, you probably won't find any available.

The upside is that your decent teams all make the playoffs, giving your prospects added playing time and growth opportunity.

The downside to THAT is that your prospects could lose a minor league World Series to some junk team with a bunch of 30 year olds in their lineup.

I'm not too concerned about seeing accurate stats. I know as long as my guys' ratings develop the production will follow.

But I do agree that having healthy minor leagues is important. If you let intentional neglect of MiL slide that could lead down a slippery slope to a dead league.

Not filling teams also gives a slight financial edge as well.

In the World I'm in, we have (in our Private World Rules) "All minor league teams must be tended to. No pitching 0(0) pitchers." and the commish does stay on top of it. Most seasons we have no issues, but once in a while someone slips (my Rookie league did last year) and we're called out on it and expected to re-stock appropriately (though at that point in the system I basically had to cycle through tryout camp arms for a while).