International Amateur Demands Low

[robert2]

I've had a standard MLB game going on from 2016-2022. Each year, international amateur free agent demands have closely mirrored real life. Top players would receive around $5-7 million, with lesser players mostly receiving 6 figures. But I just got to 2023, and several players are signing for $15-20k, which is pocket change for MLB teams. Top players are only demanding around $2M. So far, the largest bonus given out was $1.22M, with the second largest at $282k. I don't know if this has anything to do with the latest patch, but I haven't tweaked the financial settings in my game much and haven't had this problem until now.

[Matt Arnold]

I believe the demands have been adjusted slightly, and looking through, they probably got shifted down a bit too much. They can certainly be moved up a little.

[r0nster]

I thought the demands were based on settings for league average demands ??? NOT just international players but also players in general. I have seen settings for that

[injury log]

The international amateur system is intended to model the top 30 (on default settings) international amateur signings in real life.

This is 2015 international signing bonus data:

Top 40 International Bonuses Of 2015 - BaseballAmerica.com

Note the 30th highest bonus is $762,500, and a full 26 guys signed for $1m+.

This is the 2009 data:

BaseballAmerica.com: Prospects: International Affairs: Top 30 International Bonuses Of 2010

There has been some inflation since, but still the 30th highest bonus was just under $500k. If you look at the 30 players who received the highest bonuses in 2009:

- only 4 of the players now rank in their team top 30 prospects (by BA), or are established Major Leaguers (Carlos Martinez, Jorge Alfaro, Jeimer Candelario, Renato Nunez). The prospects are all in their team top 10, in fact, so these are successes.

- 16 of the players, more than half, have already been released by the team that signed them, in most cases by age 22.

The rest are non-prospect minor leaguers.

Note how low the success rate is for these prospects, a fact surely known to MLB teams. Yet teams are still willing to pay $1m+ bonuses to a lot of these players. The question is how to model this. Either the players could all be at least decent prospects, but most could bust. Or scouting error could be large enough that there is always at least one team that thinks a prospect is good, even though more often than not, the prospect is not good. The latter seems more likely to be what is true in real life, but regardless, those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

My main point though is that it does not seem right to model this by having some players demand $7m and some demand $40,000, which is what I see now in OOTP. If scouting error is great enough that some teams can see a 5-star prospect looking at any random 16 year old, then these random 16 year olds should always be asking for a whole lot more than $40k, because someone will be willing to pay them. And since it's clear real life teams have enormous trouble identifying which of these prospects will genuinely turn into good players, the best prospects shouldn't be demanding much more than the worst, most of the time.

[robert2]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

I believe the demands have been adjusted slightly, and looking through, they probably got shifted down a bit too much. They can certainly be moved up a little.

Anything you can do would be awesome. I can't say enough about how great you guys are with helping your customer base and keeping the game running smoothly.

Originally Posted by injury log

Note how low the success rate is for these prospects, a fact surely known to MLB teams. Yet teams are still willing to pay $1m+ bonuses to a lot of these players. The question is how to model this. Either the players could all be at least decent prospects, but most could bust. Or scouting error could be large enough that there is always at least one team that thinks a prospect is good, even though more often than not, the prospect is not good. The latter seems more likely to be what is true in real life, but regardless, those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

My main point though is that it does not seem right to model this by having some players demand $7m and some demand $40,000, which is what I see now in OOTP. If scouting error is great enough that some teams can see a 5-star prospect looking at any random 16 year old, then these random 16 year olds should always be asking for a whole lot more than $40k, because someone will be willing to pay them. And since it's clear real life teams have enormous trouble identifying which of these prospects will genuinely turn into good players, the best prospects shouldn't be demanding much more than the worst, most of the time.

Yeah I get what you're saying. The success rate of these top ranked int'l amateurs is ridiculously low, but there are always plenty of guys getting signed outside the top 30 that I'm sure no one really expects to become anything more than organizational depth. Anyways, I definitely feel the player demands I saw in my game from 2016-22 did the best job of modeling real life player demands.