Owners won't let me sign players longer than a year?

[daryllh]

First real stab at getting into OOTP
Historical league starting in 1977. I'm in year 3
Milwaukee Brewers
League set up with rules suggested in a thread on this forum

I tried to search for an answer but either it's an obscure question or it's such a simple answer that nobody thought of posting it here. lol. My apologies for taking up the bandwidth.

In FA, I keep getting a message from my 'owner'. I have 9,000,000 avail for signings? The owner says they won't allow this because the projected payroll in a future season is higher than the current budget.

I look at the finances section where it shows the payroll for this year and the next 4 or 5 years. From what I see, the comment doesn't make sense. My payroll is 2 million less next year and keeps going down years after that.

I'm the 19th highest payroll. I increased my attendance by 600,000 from last year. None of my players make over 1 million (1980). I have 5 players around the 500,00-800,000 range.

What sucks is that Robin Yount is probably gonna leave because I'm not allowed to sign him to a 4 year deal. Granted he's asking for a lot but the money available to me (9,000,000) makes me think I can afford him.

I understand I'm in a small market and my owner is basing decisions on that?

So, what am I not understanding? I'm pretty sure my league is set up correctly.

Also, for renegotiating...my owner only allows about $500,000 for those contracts. I sign 2-3 players during the season and it won't allow me to re-up contracts because I don't have any money left over. Why is this amount less than the total amount I have avail?

It's indeed a challenge. I can only sign players for a year. Guys like Yount don't want that. I'm afraid I'll be losing many of the guys I have because of this issue in the next 3 years.

Any help would be appreciated. If it's just part of the game, so be it. I'll honor the challenge. However, if I screwed something up with the league setup, I want to be able to change it and start over before i get too far into my career.

Thanks a bunch.

[daryllh]

Update...

Well, even I wouldn't have bitten on 3,800,000 for Yount. Phillies signed him for a year.

I've noticed that I'm able to offer anybody a 1 year deal for what they are asking but anything over a year my owner is scoffing at.

[Dr. Wu]

I haven't heard of that happening before. If the owner is telling you that you don't have enough money to sign guys, but the financial page says you do, it might be a bug that you should flag. Or, if you used a quickstart, I suppose it could be a problem with that. Weird issue, though.

[daryllh]

I think I figured it out.

I went into the league setup and saw that the team owner controls budget selection was set to Owner Decides Budget.

I switched it to entire revenue available.

I guess that's a quick fix. I'm also guessing that if i spend too much, I will have disastrous results later in the career.

Is this an option that people use? what is the norm for this selection? Also, is the historical league I set up defaulted to having owner control budget? It makes it harder but it seemed a bit unrealistic given what i saw for later years.

BTW, I started my career with Gambo DB if that makes any difference.

[tysok]

Owner controls budget just smoothes out budget changes. Although I believe it was tweaked to allow you to use cash in extensions as well, but I don't remember.

On the left side of your financial screen you should see lines that say $ for extensions and $ for free agents. Most of the time those are very different numbers.

Where exactly was it telling you that you had 9 million dollars? At the bottom of the screen when you were offering him a contract? Or somewhere else?

The financials are confusing, but owner controls budget shouldn't have been your issue I don't think.

[daryllh]

Originally Posted by tysok

Owner controls budget just smoothes out budget changes. Although I believe it was tweaked to allow you to use cash in extensions as well, but I don't remember.

On the left side of your financial screen you should see lines that say $ for extensions and $ for free agents. Most of the time those are very different numbers.

Where exactly was it telling you that you had 9 million dollars? At the bottom of the screen when you were offering him a contract? Or somewhere else?

The financials are confusing, but owner controls budget shouldn't have been your issue I don't think.

The 9 million was told to me in the offer contract window...bottom text.

[tysok]

Originally Posted by daryllh

The 9 million was told to me in the offer contract window...bottom text.

You're probably past this by now but...

Judging by what I can see you're probably running into the issue that you have different dollar amounts available for extensions than you do for free agents. It may be giving you the wrong info at the bottom of the contract offer screen.

It seems like you have about 500k for extensions. When you mentioned renegotiating in the first post. That would mean that you were running close to max budget right now. That would be for any extensions, including signing Yount up for next year.

Once gone to free agency you can spend your cash on hand. That might be where the 9 million is coming from. If you have 500k budget room and have 8.5 million in cash you would have 9 million available to sign free agents.