QuikSand
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Joined: 9/9/2005
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Another related topic... how should a player's contract/extension demand vary as the years increase?
I am glad to see a change in the general nature of these demands -- that young players now (since my last PS venture) demand *more* per year for a multi-year deal, rather than *less* like veterans do. This is without a doubt a step in the right direction.
However, I'd argue that in both cases (but especially that of younger players) the shift in pricing is not dramatic enough.
Consider a 22 year old player who may have put in a year or two in the minors, and now seems to be good enough to get a look at the major league level, and has an indication of being a pretty good MLB player. I don't claim to understand what the "potential" rating in this game means {it doesn't seem to mean what I might think it woudl mean} but by whatever means seems fair, let's just assume that the kid seems to have apparent potential.
If we approach this player, what sort of offer would be be open to in PureSim? With baseball contracts being guaranteed, a multi-year deal is insurance against injury or ratings drops and the like, but it also involves a sacrifice of the ability to really "cash in" for more than that in the open market during that stretch. That is the conundrum that faces a young player being offers a multi-year contract, rather than a short term extension.
In general, if the player is willing to sign a *one year* extension for something like $3 million... then his asking price for adding on successive years will be only a small increment on top of that... maybe bumping to something like 3.5-4.0m/yr for a five year extension. Is that realistic?
Again -- I look to MLB not as an example of a perfect system, but a representation of how these sort of risks really play out when actors are able ot make their best decisions. And what do we see? Promising young players *clearly* demand a major premium to sign for multiple years carrying into their contunied development and "prime" years. if you have a 22 or 24 year old promising young player, and you want to lock him up and keep him away from free ageny for five years -- you need to be paying him, in this last years of that contract, a pretty reasonable share of what he might expect to command on the open market. The guarantee of multiple years makes a discount of some degree worth taking for the player, but it's not a 50% or 75% discount.
Anyway... in my mind, I would think that a more reasonable increase in salary for a player asking $3m for one year would be more like this:
1 yr, 3.0
2yrs, 3.5/yr (equivalent of 3.0, 4.0)
3yrs, 4.2/yr (3.0, 4.0, 5.6)
4yrs, 5.0/yr (3.0, 4.0, 5.6, 7.4)
5 yrs, 6.1/yr (3.0, 4.0, 5.6, 7.4, 10.0)
Candidly, I don't think it's necessary to have the actual salary rise in each year of the contract (like it usually would in a real baseball contract) -- it would be fine to have the 5 year deal be 5-5-5-5-5... but the main issue is that the team should be required to pay a meaningful premium to lock up a promising young player for multiple years. He'd be giving up the right to go to the open market after two or three of those years, and command a multi-year $8-10m/yr salary or more.
Right now, in PureSim, I don't have any real trouble "unloading" contracts of players who are simply overpaid. That is an underlying problem here, somewhat separable from the financial system itself.
But with those two issues working in tandem... if I approach a promising young player with a contract extension, it is a complete *no brainer* decision to offer him the 5 year deal for a trivially higher sum per year. In my judgment, in a sport sim game, decisions should not be trivial -- they should be challenging. The fact that it is relatively easy to lock up a young player for many years and that it makes perfect sense to do so in each and every case suggests a structural imbalance here.
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PureSim financial system - 
(though I haven't done it lately so I don't know if it still exists)... When in the Free Agent signing process, I've found that if I have a player who's finally leaning towards my contract offer after a scrappy bidding war with another team, I can downplay the contract and still keep him interested- just paying him less. For example, let's say Joe Longball is leaning towards Richmond's 4yr 10-mil offer. I up that to an 10.5 mil offer and he bites. Next week, he's leaning towards our contract offer. In the past, I have gone in, offered him much less (whatever the original minimum he was accepting), say a 4-yr 5-mil offer and he remains leaning towards my offer. On a few occasions, they're "reoffered" a higher contract by the original competitor or a new team entirely, but most of the time they have stuck with my offer. In the end, they've signed the lower offer. I feel guilty about it and the only compensation my conscience has felt is that I have not done this often- 5 times in a 13-year association. Again note that I have done this in the past and not recently, so I don't know if it may have been addressed in a previous patch/hotifx.
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