SIM COMPLETE - 1987 - Free Agency 5

[Andrew]

Does the game designate players as Type A and Type B FAs? I think it used to at least. IRL compensation has nothing to do with how much a FA signs for.

I believe only if we have FA compensation turned on. I suppose we could try to turn it on at the start of free agency, record each type a and type b and then shut it right back off. Would need to test this though.

[Riverman]

I believe only if we have FA compensation turned on. I suppose we could try to turn it on at the start of free agency, record each type a and type b and then shut it right back off. Would need to test this though.

Couldn't you just leave FA compensation on all the time and edit the draft list as necessary to accord with our rules like you do now?

[Matt]

Here is something a commish posted in another league of mine...not sure how relevant it is.

GLOBAL SETUP
Financial Coefficient: Direct multiplier of all financial factors. For example, doubling it doubles all current salaries and salary demands.

Overall/Potential Ratings-Overall Rating based on all players, not positions: It might have been expected that this would have an effect on salary demands, but it doesn't. All it appears to change is player rating for display purposes, not for financial calculations.


AI OPTIONS
AI Player Evaluation Options: These weights affect displayed Overall Rating for the player and impact the salary demands, but do not change the Potential Rating for the player. The key thing to note from this is that the Overall Rating is one of the basis for determining salary demands.


LEAGUE SETUP
Surprisingly few of these settings had an effect in the static tests. I have reason to believe that some of them will when I advance the league to Free Agency or to the beginning of a new season.

Rules-Minimum Wage: This only affects the salary demands of players who fall in the lowest tiers of the salary chart. It not only sets a floor, but some players can be elevated into the next tier on the salary chart by it, upping their demands even if those were already in excess of minimum wage. However, it will normally only affect players whose demands are very low to begin with.

Rules-Player Quality Typical Salary: These ratings have a linear effect on player salary demands. A player will be ranked and his demands will be based upon a straight line interpolated between the tier below his ranking and the one above. There is some other factor involved that is added to this as well, so that it isn't a direct proportion. That is, doubling both the lower and upper tier will not exactly double the demand. The closer a player is to the bottom of the ratings the more effect this has. Once you reach the higher ratings most players come close to a simple proportional relationship.

PERSONAL DETAILS
None of these had any effect on salary demands. Not age, not Popularity, not Morale.


PERSONALITY
Only two factors in this category affect salary demands; Loyalty and Greed. I was a bit surprised that Desire for a Winning Team had no effect.

Loyalty: This factor had a range of about 3-5% of salary demanded. That is, a player with a 1 Loyalty demands about 3% more than one with a 100 Loyalty when the player is near the top of the league in salary demand. In the middle tiers it is about 5%. At the very low end the salaries seem to be insensitive to Loyalty. This even includes players in the 3rd tier.

Greed: Lower Greed scores mean less greedy, despite the color coding that might lead one to believe the opposite. There can be up to a 20% difference in salary demand between a player with a 1 Score and a 100 for top quality players. This effect decreases with decreasing player quality until it disappears even on players in the Average Quality tier.


MORALE
As noted above, and a bit surprisingly, no factors here affect salary demands. Either the player will talk to you, or he won't. The amount he asks for is unaffected.


INJURY
A player's health does not affect salary demands.


ROSTER STATUS DATA
Total Major League Service Days: The integral number of years affects salary demands. A player eligible to become a Free Agent may ask for a lot more than one with an arbitration year left. There is little difference in demand between different arbitration years however. A player ineligible for arbitration may ask for less than half what he would otherwise. How far a player is from arbitration has a only a small effect on demands; though it is larger than the effect that time short of free agency has. Higher quality players are less concerned about free agency (i.e. they up their demands less than lower tier players when they reach free agent status) but are more concerned about arbitration (i.e. they up their demands more that lower tier players once they hit arbitration).

Total 40-man Roster Service Days and Total Pro Service Years had no affect on salary demands.


SALARY DATA
Current Salary: This has a very significant effect on salary demands. A player whose current contract is near to or more than what he would normally demand will up his demands somewhat. If the current salary is well in excess of what his demands would be otherwise he will usually simply ask for what he is currently making.


RATINGS DATA
The player salary demands seem to be set by - (1) The player's current overall rating, (2) the Player Quality tiers, (3) Arbitration and Free Agency Status, (4) Current Contract, (5) Greed and (6) Loyalty. Because those first two factors dominate, how a player is rated (both the AI settings and the players abilities) is critical. One thing of importance to note is that unrealized potential has no direct effect on salary demands.

Offensive Ratings: All of these have a significant effect on Batters, including even the hidden HBP rate. They have no effect on Pitchers.

Other Offensive Ratings: Running, Stealing and Baserunning affect overall rating. The two Bunting ratings do not.

Pitching Ratings: These all affect pitchers, but have no effect on batters.

Other Pitching Ratings: Endurance, Holding Runners and Groundball % affect ratings. Velocity and known pitches do not.

Defensive Ratings: The raw defensive potential ratings affect the Overall Rating, but the Position ratings do not. None of the ratings affect pitchers.

I just finished my first test on the effects of Cash on player salary demands. In this test I took a league with a $10M Cash cap (btw, Starting Balance is still called "Cash" on the Editor screen) and a team average of $4.14M in Cash and bumped both the cap and team Cash for everyone to $50M. I ran only a single off-season with this, as it will take a lot more analysis to deal with multiple seasons where more trades take place, more players get arbitration awards or go free agent, and so on. For a single off-season I could just group players easily as Not Arbitration Eligible, Arbitration Eligible and Potential Free Agent.

The testing showed that Cash has NO direct effect on player salary demands. Neither team Cash nor league Cash seemed to affect the demands. I have very strong evidence that budget room has no effect either. I need to up team budgets without changing Cash and run another off-season to confirm that. That is, test what effect, if any, that team revenues have on salary demands.

There did seem to be secondary and tertiary effects of Cash - or more likely budget room - as you'd expect. The amount of Cash (or budget room) had an effect on how much the AI would offer players. Then as those players signed in Free Agency, the demands of other players on the signing team tended to go up (by as much as 20% - though the top salary in the league went up by 50% versus the same off-season without the extra cash). This basically confirmed what I'd seen in my cursory tests, but added a wrinkle I hadn't expected. I'd thought it was top salaries in the league that affected player salary demands, but instead it appears to be the top salary on the team that affects the demands. I'll have to run more tests to confirm that, as the effect isn't big enough for the smallish database I have to resolve.

I repeated my procedure for testing cash twice more. That is, I have my baseline, and I have three runs through the off-season with the same league having 12 times as much cash (1.2B instead of 100M).

The results were the same as stated before. Cash in-and-of-itself does not affect player demands. Spending the cash doesn't either. But spending the cash on high priced players does. All changes in player demands prior to the signing of high priced players during the off-season were the result of changes in the players ratings or his being traded to another team (apparently a Loyalty effect).

A few things I found interesting in looking over this data:

• Players whose particulars (ratings, team, etc) remained the same raised their demands from the end of the season to the beginning of free agency by 50% every time (rounded to the nearest $10,000).
• Top players who declared free agency upped their demands from what they were asking for extensions.
• Players asking for more than twice what the league's current top salary were not uncommon. In one league the top shortstop free agent asked for a salary that was 2.5 times the league's top salary and half the budget of the highest budget team in the league. He settled for about 80% of his initial request... and ended up the second highest paid player in the league.

[Andrew]

Couldn't you just leave FA compensation on all the time and edit the draft list as necessary to accord with our rules like you do now?

Yeah I think that would work as well.

[Clay]

How does the game determine Type A and Type B?

[Pat]

How does the game determine Type A and Type B?

Blood test.

[Andrew]

How does the game determine Type A and Type B?

I believe it's the same as MLB. The top 20% at each position are type A and the next 20% are Type B. I assume it uses VORP to determine where players fall in these ranges.

If this change was made I would argue we should do away with Type B FA's.

[Clay]

So would we adopt those rules and, if so, do we need to vote?

[Andrew]

So would we adopt those rules and, if so, do we need to vote?

Yes, we would need a vote. I'm restoring a backup so we can take a look at who would have been type A and type B from this season's FA crop.

[Clay]

Is it just for the season before? That would be interesting in a case like Harcourt who was clearly a Type A, but lost the entire season to injury.

[mahoney2]

MLB bases it off of the last 2 seasons, OOTP may do the same thing.

[Andrew]

MLB bases it off of the last 2 seasons, OOTP may do the same thing.

It probably does something similar. It looks like this change can only be made during the pre-season so if we did decide to make it, it wouldn't take effect until the 1989 draft.

[mahoney2]

The way MLB actually does it is secret and no one really knows how it works, so we really can't base it off of that. It's always a surprise to see who gets Type A vs B, especially when you get a case like Eric Gagne for the Sox last year.

[Riverman]

The way MLB actually does it is secret and no one really knows how it works, so we really can't base it off of that. It's always a surprise to see who gets Type A vs B, especially when you get a case like Eric Gagne for the Sox last year.

We can still base it on the way that OOTP interprets the way that MLB does it though.

[mahoney2]

I agree.