Quote:
Originally Posted by Buane
It depends.
Sometimes the player eventually signs for, say, $5 million, which then frustrates the GM or GMs of different teams who had spent a previous part of Free Agency trying to pay the player $8 million but couldn't get him to listen.
Some players used to sit out for an entire season. Even once their demands had dropped to an acceptable range, the teams that had begun Free Agency as interested parties had already filled the hole in their roster with another player. To fix the "storyline" aspect of this problem we added foreign leagues so that these players that were now without suitors at least had a place to go play baseball. This also fixed the issue where players would just retire after not playing anywhere for an entire year. (this was OOTP9 I guess?)
Other times, the GMs would have to step up and meet the player's minimum demand. This led to plenty of instances where the team who signed the player had to pay him, say, $18 million even though there was no other GM in the league willing to pay more than $10 million. Not exactly a free market system.
To answer the second part of your question, no, the ability to edit player demands was just a suggestion in case actually making development changes to the free agent demand system was too difficult. Knowing nothing about what suggestions are feasible or not, I came prepared with as many solutions as I could.
I guess the problem I have with calling it "collusion" is accepting the negative connotations that come along with the word. We want the option to pay Free Agents what the market thinks they are worth instead of blindly accepting what the game sets their worth at. In a world without a players union and where the GMs/Owners of teams make no real money profits, labeling this as "collusion" is tantamount to libel.
To me this would be the same as calling a GM a "dirty tanker" because he refused to start a player that the game's scouting reports called "a superstar who could anchor any lineup" despite that player hitting .273/.313/.457 over the last two seasons.
The game is certainly not infallible when it comes to its evaluations.
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OK, well if some players end up not signing at all, that is a problem to a certain extent. As for one GM paying significantly more than other GMs are willing to offer, it's rare, but it happens. See Oliver Perez's four-year deal with the Mets that was signed when every other GM and lots of fans knew the Mets were bidding against themselves for Perez.
As for paying free agents what the market things they're worth, who sets the market other than GMs? So if the GMs only want to pay star players $3M a year in a certain offseason, even though comparable players under contract are making $10M per season, then isn't that the GMs colluding to set the market too low?