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I have no issues with part-time players having good seasons and potentially taking on more prominent roles, because, often, there is much more to their story. In many cases, you find out that these players might have easily had a much more successful MLB career if it we're for a bit of bad luck.
In the case of Hazle, injuries are what caused his failure to continue to hit well and have an MLB career. He had very good minors stats for several years leading up to 1957, although he certainly wasn't anything like we saw in late 1957. He was a late-season call-up at the very end of July, and he went on an amazing two-month run. Most of his hits came against St. Louis, Brooklyn, and Cincinnati, the three other top teams in the NL that year. He also went 2-for-4 in game seven of the World Series and helped clinch the win for Milwaukee.
Of course, he would not have hit as well over a full season, especially when he was finally starting to come down to earth in late September. But his minors stats and performances showed that he had the potential to become an MLB regular.
Going into 1958, he started suffering a series of injuries, and I think they must have been trying to have him play through them. I'm assuming that he got hurt in spring training or off-season workouts, because he was abysmal as soon as the regular season started. He ended up getting traded and sent back to the minors, and he continued to have problems until he eventually retired at age 30. Without the injuries, though, he had the talent to be a solid MLB player.
I would never want to see usage penalties in OOTP, and I know that Markus has never wanted those in the game. He leaves the usage restrictions to Strat-O-Matic, APBA, and other sims. Now that I play with historical minors, I've grown to love these what-if stories and how they can play out in OOTP. But there is a limit, and obviously I don't think we want a guy who hit .400 for two months to become a lifelong .400 or .360 hitter.
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