Regardless of the story behind their release, the take-home point is that the PEBA is beginning a campaign to weed these broken hitters out of the league... hopefully for good.
What is a "broken hitter", you ask, and how can I recognize one? All hitters have an internal BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) rating. This internal rating is the single strongest influence on batting average and the visible Contact rating. Broken hitters are ones that are supposed to be generated as bottom-of-the-barrel hitters with terrible ratings across the board. However there's a problem with the internal BABIP rating where, if a player is generated with one too low, it will actually "wrap around" and turn that ultra-low rating into an ultra-high rating. The end result is that these players can hit for unrealistically high averages - think .400 - while displaying absolutely no other offensive skills whatsoever (though they may be speedy runners).
Markus (OOTP's developer) has officially recognized this as a bug. Unfortunately it was discovered very late in the OOTP 9 development cycle. It's likely these kinds of players will be gone entirely by the time OOTP 10 arrives. For now, though, it's up to us to police ourselves.
You can help out with this by releasing all broken hitters from your organization. Over the holiday break I will be deleting every "broken hitter" who is in the free agent pool. This will include any that are released during Thursday night's sim. Releasing broken hitters is completely voluntary. You're not required to do so, and under no circumstances will broken hitters be deleted from the rosters of your teams. So it's entirely up to you. If you'd prefer to keep your broken hitters, that's perfectly acceptable. If you choose to release them and allow me to delete them, you have my thanks. And if you'd like to create a fun story around the event like Duane of Kentucky or Matt of New Jersey did, you'll have both my thanks and bonus CP to boot.
The Aurora Borealis proudly maintain a strict no-tolerance policy to broken hitters within their organization.
