[uruguru]

Nov 12, 1960 to Dec 20 (Rule V draft)

11/12 - 5 more prospects sign contracts including 3B Ken McMullen 3/9!

11/13 - 6 more sign, all immediately to the trading block.

11/14 - 3 more.

11/15 - 2 more sign, but one is a biggie: RF Lou Brock 4/10. We have a beast of a farm system now. 94 players now, with 62 outstanding offers. Apparently the hack is having signing bonuses with your milb offers.

11/16 - 5 more.

11/17 - 3 more sign, but SP Dave McNally 1/5 and SP Carl Bouldin 4/5 both want me to up their milb signing bonus from around $2000 to around $15000. Wow, and no. I'm think I'm going to need to shed some of these contracts anyway, so it was nice of these two guys to step up and volunteer.

11/18 - 7 more signed. I now have 108 players signed and 45 contract offers pending. I still need to shed 3 of these. Nice problem to have, tbh.

11/19 - 3 more signed. SP Sammy Ellis 5/8 ended up signing with Toronto for 10 years at $148K. The news notice was pretty passive aggressive. It said "Though his numbers don't jump out at you, Ellis does fill a void for Toronto, according to several respected analysts."

Also, SP Steve Hargan 1/6 asked for a massive signing bonus. Interesting why this is happening now.

11/20 Big Day. 11 more sign, including SP Dennis Ribant 6/10 for $140K over 10 years. The analysts like this much better than Toronto's signing of Ellis. "The deal is being hailed by media analysts... the consensus is that Ribant will contribute a lot to the team"

11/21 4 more signed, including SP Dave Guisti 6/10 for $130K for 10 years, and C Bill Freehan 4/10 for $23K for 5 years.

11/22 No news today. Exhausted from the last 11 days of high-powered GM'ing, I finally catch some ZZZZs.

11/26 A few guys wanted $15K signing bonuses during this time, and I'm happy to let them go. However, when SP Tommy John 3/8 pulled that stunt, I just offered him a $15000 MLB deal. He can slave away in the bullpen until he gets better. Same thing for SP Clay Carroll 1/6. SP Dave Morehead 5/5 signed for 5 years at $23K. Happy about that.

11/30 I've hit some weird bug where the top unsigned prospects are now asking for increasingly wild signing bonuses, up to $30K now. So I am instead offering them $15K MLB contracts with the plan of just keeping them on the 40-man and letting them play in the minors until I trade them. Otherwise remaining milb offers are slowly dribbling in now.

12/5 I'm in a bidding war with the Red Sox over Brooks Robinson. The last offer was $225K for 8 years. Pricey!

12/11 2B Nellie Fox 6/6 just signed for 4 years at $140K. He's 32 but extremely popular. Fan interest jumped from 52 to 57!

12/20 The Rule V draft is about to start. We have one outstanding MLB offer (Brooks Robinson) and 5 outstanding offers for the last 5 minor-league spots in the franchise. If Brooks is signed, we'll still have 4 MLB spots to fill for reserve players. Hopefully we'll get something good in the Rule V draft for that.

Also, planned 3B Domingo Pascual is going to rate 4/4 at 3B, whereas he was 5/5 at 2B. This means that 3B will be a potential upgrade opportunity for us.

I'm not going to lie, this past month has been a total domination by me of signing prospects. I didn't realize this beforehand, but the AI clearly does not offer signing bonuses with milb contracts. I did, and as a result I won all of the contracts. Every single player in the organization is at least 2.5 stars of potential, whereas almost none in the other new organizations have players of that potential. Unless my scout is the worst scout in the world, this next season is going to be a bloodbath, especially if I can trade some prospects for star starters.

This is a bug for the AI negotiations. Fortunately, I did not realize it so my signing bonuses were often hefty, based on the quality of the prospect. Someone wanting to exploit this could snap up everyone with relatively small bonuses.