The IFAs are the biggest lottery tickets out there. In the league Kevrock and I are in I've traded away my next five 1st rounders for pitching help and invested my draft money in IFAs. Over the past four years I've probably spent $70M on IFAs and have one of the better farm systems in our league (we can only spend over $4M every two years). A couple of them have "popped" from "good potential" to "great potential" but I find most "great potential" IFAs turn out to be "not so great" by the time they hit AA, especially outfielders. I have had a couple of catcher IFA prospects turn out great but those guys also had good ceilings and didn't get hurt (something that plagues our IFA pitching prospects).
The OOTP17 engine had some really quirky development arcs for "black swan" players. I had a LHP that had 55 stuff potential at 21 jump up to 80 stuff in a single season and added a pitch. Of course, that only happened after I traded him for a #4 starter but it happens a lot, especially with pitchers. I don't remember that happening in OOTP16 or even OOTP15 but in OOTP17 it happened quite a bit in our league. There aren't many position players that had ratings jumps like that in our league but apparently it's a thing with pitchers. The guys in our drafts have almost never had any kind of insane ratings bumps like the ones with pitchers though I did have a guy with 55 power potential suddenly jump up to 80 after a sim. He hasn't lived up to it (they rarely do) but he's not my problem now.
