Clearly you guys don't manage the Cubs.
I think it's a bug because the #1 problem facing a Cubs GM starting in 2011 is Soriano's contract. It's probably the worst contract in the game. He's a below-average left fielder (1-1.5 star overall rating), 32 years old (and Dominican, so possibly not really even that young, though I'm not sure if the game factors that in), making $16M/year for the next 4 years. It's not like it completely cripples your team, because the Cubs are a big-market team, but it pretty much makes your effective budget $124M instead of $140M. I tried numerous times to offload him in trades, but as soon as he hit the table, the talks were over. I was pretty much resigned, as the Cubs are in real life, to just riding out the contract and making the best of it.
Kyler Burke is an unremarkable 23-year-old 1-star-potential prospect, another outfielder. Ryan Franklin, on the other hand, is a 38-year-old 4.5-star middle reliever, making $3.25M/year in the last year of his contract. He'll be a key contributor for me down the stretch.
Even accounting for variances in teams' evaluations of players, there's no way to logically justify this trade for them. I'm leading the division; St. Louis was 8 games under .500 & out of it. It's not a salary dump. They're not getting a good prospect. They just gave me a very good player in exchange for taking on a gigantic albatross. BTW, I played St. Louis in a series not long afterwards, and Soriano isn't even starting for them. One of the appeals of this game is that you can't just build a superteam by taking advantage of sloppy AI, but in this case it laid a huge egg.