What would happen if....

[gollum65]

Many of you are familiar with me as I run the Ash & Maple Baseball League (AMBL). We're a league that started in OOTP 9 in 2008 with Cubbyfan's 2008 rosters. We're still in OOTP 9 and we're finishing the 2012 regular season soon. As a league we've been discussing converting to OOTP X, but the league has some issues that I would like to have some idea about if they'd be resolved if we converted.

As an OOTP X beta tester I was on the team that tested online league functionality, so the issues the AMBL are having weren't part of my testing scope, namely league finances.

We're a 30 team MLB based league. Almost from the start we saw a few issues that have plagued the league to this point. With cash max set at $50M dollars, 25 of 30 teams now have positive cash balances and quite a few are at the cash max. Five teams have player payrolls over their current budgets (we have coaching off), and yet they're all have positive cash balances. The teams that have negative cash balances are some of the biggest budget and market teams: Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Yankees, & Philadelphia. So it's almost seemed to me like OOTP 9 works backwards. The big market teams lose money while the small market teams make money hand over fist.

The cash/budget issue has caused other problems in our league. The first is that the "big ticket" free agents never hit the market because it's been too easy for teams to resign their stars. It's been so extreme that we ended up voting to throw out free agent compensation because teams didn't like losing draft picks for signing "mediocre" free agents.

Another problem has been trying to figure out ways to spend that excess cash so many teams have in their bank accounts. We started creating fictional foreign leagues to simulate the "posting" process that is currently in place with players from countries like Japan (Dice-K, Matsui, etc..) and we allow the teams that have cash to bid on a few players each season so they have something to spend money on.

We've discussed ideas such as hard salary caps, stadium renovation and the building of new stadiums, adding coaches to the league, lowering the cash max, lowering media revenue, etc... Pretty much anything we could think of to allow teams to spend their extra cash. And many of those ideas have been voted down because the league doesn't think they will solve our problems, just put band aids on them, and I agree.

Here's our current league financial statement: ashmaplebaseball.info/reports/news/html/leagues/league_100_financial_report.html

I know the financial model in OOTP X was tweaked. I also realize that nothing would be fixed "overnight" if we converted our league to OOTP X. I've seen suggestions of setting cash max to $1 billion dollars, but this seems to me to be counter productive in my case. I think that would make our problems worse, not better.

So what I want to know is, if we converted this league to X, would the financial model eventually "correct itself" and would my league be financially stable in the future? Are there settings I should change if I do convert to X? If I stay in 9 are there settings I should change?

[Alan T]

I'm by no means a financial expert in OOTP, but I guess my main question is:

If your problems are with excess cash hanging around and it being too easy to re-sign pending free agents before they hit the market, why not make one of two changes (or both to some extent)? By lowering the maximum cash that is sitting around would lead to tougher decisions for teams, or you can raise the amount of money being demanded by the top 2-4 tiers of players which should then increase how much they ask for.

I don't know that I would ever "trust" ootp to fix itself after an upgrade.

[gollum65]

I guess one thing that's always confused me is wheter OOTP takes cash on hand into what a player asks for in contract demands? So in other words, if I put a player on a team with $40M cash on hand, he'd ask for more then if he was on a team with a negative cash balance?

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by gollum65

I guess one thing that's always confused me is wheter OOTP takes cash on hand into what a player asks for in contract demands? So in other words, if I put a player on a team with $40M cash on hand, he'd ask for more then if he was on a team with a negative cash balance?

I don't believe it is that team's cash on hand, but the players do look at how much cash is on hand in the league I believe. If there is a ton of cash floating around in a league, players will tend to ask for more money in salary demands.

I find though that with alot of cash floating around for all teams, this isn't really a huge issue in re-signing players as eventually players will sign for less if there is no demand for them.

[gollum65]

Interesting ideas. We hadn't thought about changing contract demands.