[Syd Thrift]

To your first question, there is very little actual difference in terms of overall scoring when it comes to lineup selection, with the caveat that you generally want your best players to get the most plate appearances. Otherwise, as long as you don’t, like, run your lineup in order of reverse OPS, the difference between an optimal lineup and one that makes baseball sense is maybe 5 runs a year.

Otherwise, you can tailor what exactly you manage and what you don’t. I don’t really like to bother with individual pitch related stuff like stealing or the hit and run (in large part because the game doesnt actually simulate one pitch at a time) so I leave base running decisions up to the coaching staff and generally concentrate on substitutions and the like. If I feel like a guy is running too much I’ll turn down his slider on his strategy page but that’s usually about as far as I go.

Otherwise, baseball is a game that’s heavily contingent on luck. That’s kind of its charm. Sometimes you’ll get results from an entire season that were just plain unlucky (especially with an individual player - generally, one standard deviation’s worth of batting average is around 25 points for a full season, which means that 2/3rds of your team will hit within 25 points of the average they’re supposed to hit at, but every year you can more or less expect one guy in your lineup to hit 50 points higher or lower than what he “should” hit), but for sure, absolutely you will see a good hitting team struggle to hit over any given 15 game period. Billy Beane talked about how he used to work out during games so that he wouldn’t make rash decisions based on a single at bat or even five straight Ks or something.