The fact that you are calling players “ bench players” shows your ignorance. Let me tell you how this works. There’s coaches and there’s players. It’s called a team. A team is a group of people whose goal is a common one. The returning players, regardless of how good they are cannot win a game by themselves. If one of your all conference players gets hurt game 1 of state, does it make sense to have to put in a player that sat the bench all season? It doesn’t make sense to you to allow players to get more playing time in the weaker matchups? Or are you a parent whose only interest is how much playing time your all conference daughter gets? College coaches don’t care about how many minutes players played or how many games…. They care about what they did in the time she did play . A great player only needs 1 inning, 1 game. Obviously the coach sees ALL the players as important.