Quote:
Originally Posted by Samueltbaum
Hmm... I appreciate your insight. What is the difference? Same exact team, just one won championship.
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It's not so much the won championship. It's the early playoff exit that prevents promotion to the next higher level and keeps the team in a lower league where it might not belong. If you're consistently winning 100+ games at your current level then you should expect to get promoted in short order. Yes, you might have bad playoff luck for a few weeks, but your team is dominating its current level and clearly should be facing better competition.
The issue mentioned is one where a team runs out a league-average or better rotation, makes the playoffs, and then benches or sends its quality pitchers to the reserve roster, replacing them with crap cards that will all but ensure an early playoff exit and keep them at their current level. I haven't personally seen this, but I've seen variants involving player roles. I once found a team that would play its A roster when at the lower level and then switch to the B roster when it was promoted (inferior players to ensure relegation back to their prior level). There are all kinds of ways to cheat the system, and I imagine most of them have been figured out and used by someone sometime.
This is done to maximize performance achievements and hardware rewards and is not uncommon in the lowest-level leagues. There are a lot of teams that stay in Stone and Rookie league for months, and not all of them are abandoned. Some of them purposely stay there for the reward points and, I guess, for the "thrill" of beating weak competition.