Astronomical budgets and cash

[DetroitStyle]

I'm in 2037 of a current save. I can't say I ever remember seeing budgets like this for large market teams. Is this normal? I play with small market teams so I never paid much attention.

It feels game breaking to be the Yankees. I can max all the budgets and still have room to sign all the big FAs and extensions. But maybe that's just the Yankees in real life, lol!

[OutS|der]

Your revenue is out of wack compared to your expenses. Even Oakland made 60 million, so I'd assume this would cause their budget to go up.
White Sox made 100 million with just under 14 in expenses.

I've found budgets can quickly get out of hand when the teams make a lot of money. Not very realistic, as most teams would sit on the cash rather then increase the budgets to this extreme.

Also looks like the Pirates are breaking your game as well. They somehow have the biggest payroll.

[DetroitStyle]

The pirates thing can happen, not necessarily game breaking. If you have enough stars up for arbitration or if the CPU backloads contracts you can end up in a situation where the next year the payroll explodes.

[panda234]

The Dodgers have big budgets too. It’s an advantage, but not as big as you would think.

[Pelican]

In my contemporary sims I choose to run a small-market team like the Pirates or the Rockies or the A's, but in a redesigned financial system. Either I implement a salary floor number (salary cap does not work), or I simply give the small-market teams more revenue and more cash. In the latter case, these teams have a choice of signing free agents or investing the money in scouting and player development. Signing free agents to fill gaping holes can make a bad team competitive pretty fast. It reduces - but does not eliminate - the advantage that LA and both NY teams and Atlanta and a few others have with huge spending. Over time, reducing the gap between wealthy and poor teams increases competition. Done right, you can forget 100-win or 100-loss teams. If you want parity in competition, start with parity in resources. That sounds like socialism to some people, who apparently enjoy the "rich get richer" aspects of MLB. It sounds like real fun baseball to me.