No more $0 Minor contract

[Evan Taylor]

Hi all,

I don't understand, given the felxibility of the financial system and the many options, that there is none about the minor contracts salary... I find it really immersion breaking to see players playing for free, and I think it is extremly easy to implement, doing just a few things:

For the Major / Minor structure:

Adding a League option to determine the Minor contract salary amount (from what I read, an upper A minor league baseball player would earn about $1500 per month). It would be a fixed amount for the whole season, with maybe the option to change it for the next season.

How it works? Quite simple.

As the Minor League teams don't support financials, those minor league salaries would be added to the expenses of the Parent team. Easy right?

For the Independent Leagues:

Here, to replace the minor league teams, a Reserve roster has been added. It is very useful, but the same system should be applied here as it works exactly the same, the reserve roster players have minor league contracts. As those teams are not affiliated, please allow, as for the Major / Minor structure above, a setting to determine for the league the amount of the Minor Contract salary.


Overall, I think, tell me if I'm wrong, that it is very easy to implement, and that it adds a lot more realism to the game. It is only adding a new setting, and adding some lines of code to add the minor league salaries of all affiliated teams (basically, the value of the setting multiplied by the number of minor league contracts), and to add it to the player expenses of the parent team.

Ideally, in the case the actual minor league contracts for players in the reserve roster, it would be nice to rename them to something like minimum salary contract, as there is properly no Major/Minor structure, but that would be a + to this suggestion.

What do you think about this idea?

[Yarideki]

I'm somewhat necro'ing this thread but I do agree that having the option to set a custom amount for the minor league salary would be nice even if that value has to remain fixed for all minor league players initially. My suggestion would be to have this be a parent league setting. It would make the salary report a lot more interesting for me for sure. Though I do wonder how the AI would respond in a situation where it needs to sign a minor league player but doesn't have the budget to do so. Maybe this would be left as 0 by default to not confuse new players.

[Le Grande Orange]

Instead of direct minor league salaries, I'd suggest the following: a minor league system operating expense, based on the number of affiliates.

[bwburke94]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Instead of direct minor league salaries, I'd suggest the following: a minor league system operating expense, based on the number of affiliates.

After all, an over-budget team needs to be able to fill out their minors!

[HerbD]

I always took it as the minor league owner was responsible for those contracts so they did not come out of the major league budget and the best way to represent that from the standpoint of running the major league team was to have a zero value.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by bwburke94

After all, an over-budget team needs to be able to fill out their minors!

Good point.

It just seemed simpler to me to add a minor league system operating expense, which has real-life parallel, as the major league parent pays for the not only the affiliates' players, but also the salaries of the managers, coaches, and trainers, the spring training costs, some hotel expenses, two-thirds to three-quarters of the costs of bats and balls used by the minor league affiliates, along with assorted other operating expenses. The minor league affiliates are responsible for most of the travel costs, team uniforms, and all of its stadium, ticketing, advertising, broadcasting, and front office costs.

Tying such costs to the number of affiliates operated, for OOTP purposes, means, in a more 1950s-type of situation where major league clubs aren't tied to a 1:1 ratio of affiliate to parent at each level, the wealthier clubs could afford to operate more affiliates than poorer clubs.

[malor]

While I get where your coming from on this feature, I don't see the "fun factor" gain from implementing minor league financials. Are you really not going to sign a player to a minor league contract because it will cost ~$10000 for a four month season. That is peanuts compared to the millions being paid out to players on the major league roster.

Keep in mind, if salaries are added to the the minors, you need to implement attendance/ticket prices and all of the other related income/expense by minor league team. Basically full financials. That all will need to be managed either by the human GM or as I suspect, by the AI because most players will not want to deal with it and will want a way to delegate. That means the AI needs to be coded to handle it. This will take development time away from things that us humans will actually interact with.

Personally, I would like the feature, but there are many more things that probably should be coded first before this one is added.

[Mr. Marlin]

I have to agree with Malor. There is a point of diminishing returns when you consider the time/effort to implement something and what that something actually adds. OOTP is already unrealistic in that all parent clubs "own" their minor league affiliates. While IRL many do it's not the majority. But keeping that if the minor leage players have a salary then you need to figure revenue from minor league teams to offset that. Which opens up a whole other set of options like minor league ticket prices, media, salary structure.

Hey I love micromanaging but I can see where this could get tedious real quick. And If I were to just delegate these tasks to the AI why bother having them in the first place?

It's a nice idea but it seems like the enjoyment of that detail might not be worth the effort to make it happen. Even as realistic as OOTP can be I'm willing to suspend disbelief on some things. Minor League revenue and salary being a zero sum equation is one of them.

[darkcloud4579]

It's worked for this long in OOTP, it's one of the things I am very okay with how it works and it's been a constant across versions in a way that's not obtrusive.