Historical Play Teams Negative Balance

[Jor97]

I was hoping to start a somewhat different historical replay of the 2005 Blue Jays with finances and trading turned on in order to possibly trade for relievers at the deadline. Upon looking at the finances however, a significant amount of teams are heavily negative in budget space which makes them pretty much unable to conduct trades.

The only way to somewhat mitigate this (expect individual editing of budgets) was for me to reload the financial modifiers and apply the correction on contracts, this left only a few teams in the red. Is there any reason why the standard finances show up this skewed?

[Daniel_09]

Originally Posted by Jor97

I was hoping to start a somewhat different historical replay of the 2005 Blue Jays with finances and trading turned on in order to possibly trade for relievers at the deadline. Upon looking at the finances however, a significant amount of teams are heavily negative in budget space which makes them pretty much unable to conduct trades.

The only way to somewhat mitigate this (expect individual editing of budgets) was for me to reload the financial modifiers and apply the correction on contracts, this left only a few teams in the red. Is there any reason why the standard finances show up this skewed?

As a player who only plays historically, I can tell you that OOTP has always had this problem. It imports historical financial data (TV revenue, ticket prices, etc.) and then loads the contracts of the players who played that year. In real life, we don't know what the team's finances were when they made the signings (it's all guesswork), and this happens with 50-60% of all teams in any historical year you start.

You have two options: either edit the finances for the first year yourself (which is a long and tedious process) or let the AI ​​manage each team's finances for two or three years of simulation. Afterward, you'll see that all the teams have a reasonable budget.

[Daniel_09]

And this is nothing, you start in the 90s and teams have a balance of -$3M when minor league contracts are $110K