(Zontar, buddy, this one’s for you.)
(Also, a warning: this is super-long, but given how many different areas there are to explore on this topic that aren’t even handled here, it made sense to group all of the stuff below into one post, at least.)
The minor leagues are weird. Actually, scratch that, baseball is weird. Baseball players are seemingly subject to inexorable laws like regression to the mean, but are also all special snowflakes with unique talents and developmental paths. If baseball were a poorly-programmed video game, there would probably be a system where every player that enters an organization’s minor league system would spend a year at each level, before finally being promoted to the major league team after a full season in AAA.