Unusually frontloaded contracts

[injury log]

There have been a couple of discussions of this in General (linked below), but I don't think it's appeared in Tech Support. Many have noticed, even under the latest patch, contract extensions given by the AI that look something like this:

Year 1: $5,000,000
Year 2: $5,000,000
Year 3: $380,000

When I've noticed this, the contracts have been three year deals, with the third at the minimum salary, the first two at a much higher salary. While not a bug per se, the contracts are so unusual that I expect this game behaviour is unintended.

The last two times I've seen this, the player had just over 4 years of MLB service, and was given a contract extension by the AI; the first two years of the extension, at about $5m per year, would have covered his arbitration years, while the third year, at the minimum salary, would have covered his first year of free agency. Kelric, who initiated the most recent discussion of this in General, has also verified that in his two examples, the players had 4+ years of service and were given three year extensions by the AI. While I cannot be sure these are the only players affected, I haven't seen it occur with others since I began to wonder if service time was an issue here. It certainly does not affect all arb-eligible players given longer extensions, as I've just confirmed in my current league.

What surely is a bug: The 'Meet Demand' feature, on the contract offer/extensions screen, will sometimes produce contract offers with the same sort of breakdown as described above. Since the owner will never accept a contract with such unevenly distributed salary, 'Meet Demand' is not very helpful when it produces such an offer; one has to completely re-edit the salaries.

Links to the two discussions in General about these unusual contracts, if you would like confirmation that many have noticed this issue:

Strange Contract (see posts 1 and 9)

Talk about a front loaded contract... (see post 1, and further discussion below of service time)

[Nutlaw]

This is an old issue that was thought to have been addressed some time ago. I can't find the original TT, so I've put it in as TT 3783.

[Curtis]

So it WAS in Tech Support previously! I wonder why none of the three of us could find it. Was it originally TT'd under 2006?

[Nutlaw]

Yeah. Actually, I think that I first reported it in 2006.

[Nutlaw]

This has been claimed fixed for the next patch. If after installing the (as yet unreleased) third patch, you find this to still be an issue, please post the above TT number in Tech Support so that it the issue can be re-opened. Thanks.