Quote:
Originally Posted by The Wolf
Too much cash on hand ==> outrageous FA demands
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I fail to see how this addresses anything else in Buane's post.
Let's break it down in a different way. What I'm hearing is "if your cash on hand strays above X, then things get weird and free agents ask for a boatload of money."
What that really means, though, is that OOTP is really designed around one type of league structure. That's the league structure where all teams keep their payrolls right around their budgets, and nobody stores up any kind of cash reserves.
Interestingly enough, when people instead of computers are put in charge of teams, this is not how things always work out. Some teams tank. Some teams dump contracts midseason and end up with a big surplus at the end of the year. Some teams pick up said bad contracts and go way in the red. Some act like dunces, completely ignore the game for all of free agency because something is going on, and suddenly pick it back up again when spring training starts with 50 million in budget room and no free agents left. The point here is that people do
different things, and that is both expected and ok.
OOTP, though, is basing free agent demands on an algorithm or the state of the league. I understand that, and certainly get it, but the point here is that it's pretty clearly putting too much emphasis on cash on hand and not enough on budgets. Budgets are the ultimate payroll constraint. I can have 100 million in cash on hand, but that doesn't mean I can sign 3 guys to 24 million/year deals because I will be in the red so fast it'll make your head spin if the budget itself is stuck at 105 million. Moreover, multi-year deals of that scale are out of the question because those
are based on budget. 8 year, 24 million AAV demands from mediocre corner outfielders are not reasonable in that kind of league.
These things almost certainly are not problems in offline leagues. Buane is asking for some minor changes or measures of control. Something special, specific to online leagues, to allow the commissioner some modicum of control over the situation in order to prevent things from spinning completely out of control.
None of this even addresses the issue of free agents quick-signing without giving the option to another team to sign, a problem that is very specific to online, or extremely long 'pending' scenarios where money is unusable because it's a pending contract.
ETA: Modifying the max cash on hand is the ultimate cop-out avoid-the-problem 'solution'. We can be better.