AAA Roster

[christoph]

Does it matter how many players you have in Triple A. I know that a very small AAA roster can pose problems if there are lots of injuries on the big club, but does it pose any other problems? Does a small AAA roster affect how farm players develop? Also, does calling up rookies early totally mess up their development?

[Particleman]

Calling up young players will not mess up their development, infact I often have to find playtime in the majors to further develop my young players. I don't think that that the number of players in AAA affects develpment at all. Personally I don't find I need a large AAA roster, I usually only keep about 6 position players and 6 pitchers in AAA, many of the players will never pan out so I don't bother paying them, and release them before they ever play a major league game, in which case it costs no money to cut.

[christoph]

Thanks. This is about what I suspected. While I have kept replacements for every position, I generally only keep the prospects I think are big league material. However, since I am only into my first season as a GM, I didn't know the full implications of having a short AAA roster. Looking around my league, I saw many teams with very large AAA rosters. Many of these are on teams will inactive GMs, so I assumed that they were unnecessarily large and proceeded to cut the fat on my team based on intuition.

Can you tell me how players are added to my triple A team? How many players can I expect to be added to my team via the draft, and what expenses can I expect to incur from this? Do drafted prospects have different contracts? or are they auto-signed to your team when the CPU adds them via the draft?

[Particleman]

You get around 6 (the number is random) new players at the each season. The quality of these players depends on how poorly you finish in the standings and how much you spend on your farm spending. All rookies are signed to 1 point contracts for 5 years. In general young players even those with A+ ratings tend to be erratic, so it's a good idea to give them a year or 2 in AAA before giving them major playtime, there is the odd exception of a super rookie though that is able to play from the start. Often the reason rookies with A ratings tend to do poorly is because if you have good scouting, your scouts can often see the future development of a player and this will be accounted for in your ratings. So an A+ rookie may actually only have a B in certain ratings, but in the future he will develop into an A. The one place that will hurt the development of a young player is the bench though. So it's a good idea to get average old veterans to fill the bench.

[hwt1313]

I have read in previous posts that fewer AAA players will focus the resources, and increase improvements. I don't know which is true. I hope an admin can clear this up.