[Syd Thrift]

To an extent, the game is easy to keep it playable. IRL if you went to a GM with a way-below-value trade offer, he'd laugh you off and not even listen to later deals. He sure as heck wouldn't sit there while you slowly increased value until you reached the lowest level of what he considered "fair". If he stayed there at all with you, it might be to try and return the "I'm gonna fleece this guy" trick right back at you. Unfortunately, the trade AI won't send you anything more than once a day to keep the game from being about micromanaging trade requests, so that's one advantage you'll have for the forseeable future.

I still like my old-skool idea of assigning bad-boy points to GMs who mess around with the order of baseball a la the Europa Universalis series. Think of the Yankees in the 50s and 60s who were basically stuck with trading with the Kansas City A's for a while because nobody else would stay in the same room with their GM for more than 15 minutes at a time. Or the problems Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley had with getting the league to allow them to do basic things with their franchises like move them out of horrendously bad situations (like Veeck in St. Louis or Finley in Oakland). The AI right now is too much like a set of 30 Billy Beane wannabes and not enough like the old boys' club that MLB was up until the 70s.