Questions from a noob

[Echo127]

Hey everyone, glad to be in the league!  I've only got a few weeks of experience with OOTP, so I'm going to be using this thread to help me get up to speed.   

I'll have more questions later tonight, but I want to get the most pressing one out there right away:

How should I be handling my finances? I started digging through my team last night and found that I've only got ~3million available in my budget. *However* the AI currently has something like $24 million dollars in free agent offers currently pending. Since I'm definitely in rebuild mode, I expect that this is very bad, and that I'm going to want to cancel most of those offers before the next 7 days are simmed so that I don't get stuck with the contracts.  And that leaves me with the question: How much *should* I be spending?  How much am I physically (digitally?) allowed to spend? What are the ramifications of going over budget?

[Huckleberry]

First, make sure you've read and understand the WBA financial system because it's not handled in-game.  Your current budget and cash numbers are accurate and are based on a projection of your team's performance in the upcoming season.  However that projection is based on your pythagorean record from last year so it can be wildly off either in a good way or a bad way.

As for your questions the good news is that like many WBA teams you have plenty of cash to ride out a bad contract or two.  You have nearly $30M in cash reserves so going over your budget even by $10M won't kill you.  Obviously, though, you wouldn't want to sign a bunch of long term contracts that project you to be $10M over budget for the next 5 years.

The game will allow you to offer contracts all the way up to your budget plus cash.  So you currently have a budget of $41,756,075 and $29,295,634 in cash.  That means the game will allow you to offer contracts until you have a total of $71,051,709 in possible salary for the 2103 season.  It also looks at the following year's budget but I manually edit those numbers to be equal so the same total should apply.  I believe, but am not certain, that if you go negative cash you can still offer salaries up to your budget.

[Echo127]

Well $#%!, it looks like I just missed the free agent signing period! That really blows.  I thought (per your constitution) that you guys simmed every Sunday/Monday/Wednesday/Friday.  What's the deal? I was looking forward to making my own free agent decisions tonight before the 9:00 deadline....

Anyhow, I think I understand the financials now.  What OOTP shows in-game was really confusing me. Two more questions:
1.  How does the rookie draft work in an online league?
2.  After downloading the latest league file, the game crashed because it lost my log-in info.  I had to re-download the human_managers.dat file to get back in.  Can I assume that this will be fixed after I've actually had a chance to export my info?

[Echo127]

Update: OK, maybe I don't understand the finances...

Since I've got a bit more headroom than I expected, I thought I'd try find a decent SP to replace my 1-star guy.  So I made the below offer, only to be informed that I don't have enough money available. My Budget is 41.8m.  My current payroll is 38.4m. My cash is 29.3m. I've got 4.8m in other offers pending.  What am I missing? And why does the projected budget room in the screenshot below not equal Budget - Payroll?  Sorry if I'm being dense.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_qfPp6O90YDY0hVcFkyQXNnSTg

Edit: Before making this offer, I had withdrawn an offer that the AI had made that was for *more* $/year than the new offer that I'm trying to make. So I'm very confused.

[CLK]

To answer one of your questions, during the offseason, we run a 7 day sim every night.

[Huckleberry]

Yes, we run a sim pretty much every day during the offseason.  I think the constitution says that offseason sim schedules will be discussed but sorry for not clarifying that.

Rookie draft is taking place in the OOTP Utilities right now.  Sign in there and go do "Draft" on the main menu.  You can set up a list moving forward.

Not sure what happened on the log-in causing a crash.  Hopefully that will correct itself, be sure to "Download latest league file" when you go into the game.

I sent a request for permission to view your Google Drive document.  I'll take a look and see if I can figure out what's going on there once I can see it.

[Echo127]

Sorry, forgot to turn link sharing on. Should be able to see the picture now.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_qfPp6O90YDY0hVcFkyQXNnSTg/view?usp=docslist_api

[Huckleberry]

That is strange.  I will try to look into it but you're correct that you should be able to offer that contract.

As for the projected budget room, that is a weird calculation issue in the offseason on OOTP's part.  See this thread:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/board/ootp-14-general-discussions/234934-projected-budget-room.html

[Huckleberry]

Okay, I logged into the game as you and attempted to make that offer and it went through (I then killed OOTP16 via task manager so it wouldn't save).  Let me know if it's still not working today after you download the latest league file.  Hopefully it's just a glitch that clears up when you update.

[Echo127]

Thanks Huck, everything in my game seems to be working fine today, so whatever glitch I had yesterday is gone. I chose not to make that free agent offer though.

Anyways, for today's question:
Can someone explain to me how the auto-renewed major-league-minimum contracts work? As I understand it, all players are allowed to stay on the minimum major league salary for 5 years.  But is this five years from when they first play in the Major Leagues?  Or 5 years from when they're drafted?  I feel like I should know this from real-life baseball, but I guess I haven't payed too much attention to player salaries in the past.

[Huckleberry]

It's 5 years in the major leagues.  So the clock does not start ticking on that until they appear in a major league game.

However, minor league free agency occurs after 5 years in the minors, so you can't just stash guys in the minors forever.