After the team has been built, the role of general manager gives way to the role of manager. Just as the decisions made in creating the team are vital to the team's performance, the decisions made by the manager can go a long way to determining whether or not a team is successful. Assuming salaries accurately value a player's potential SimLeague Baseball performance and that just about all users spend almost all of their money, making the most of managerial options is how many users set themselves apart from the competition.
Two ways in which a manager affects the game are through setting style and hierarchies. Style tendencies can be found in the Manager's Center under the Team Managerial Style. This style sets the tone for the team in unique baseball situations. Every option from Hit and Run to Base Running to Intentional Walks is on a scale from 0 – Never to 5 – Very Aggressive. Every time a situation like this occurs in a game, the simulator will consider these settings as well as the player. For instance, even a Very Aggressive setting for Intentional Walks is not going to walk 1988 Tom Nieto to get to 1923 Babe Ruth.
Style also includes how aggressively to pinch-hit, pinch-run, double-switch, substitute for defense and rest players. When setting these items, consider the depth of the bench and whether this is a league with a DH.
There are three types of hierarchies: Rest, Defensive Replacement and Pinch-hitting. By default, these settings are set to the recommendations. In most cases, the recommendations will suffice. However, they will not set a player to play a position for which he is not eligible.
The Player Rest hierarchy will take the next player available when the engine denotes a player needs rest either due to the rest settings above or because the player is in the starting lineup and is below his auto-rest settings. The Defensive Replacement hierarchy works similarly in that better ranked bench players will replace worse players in the field if the situation calls for defensive replacements. The Pinch-Hit hierarchy will simply use the highest rated player who is not already in the game to pinch-hit in the situation. The Advanced Settings described later can be used to keep a player from being removed from the game under any of these circumstances.