If two owners both submit the league max bid for an ifa- how will he decide where to go? Does he care about the combined iq of all his coaches? Also can you offer more in salary (he wants a big league contract) to differentiate yourself? Appreciate any thoughts...

Nobody responded to this.  I'd be really interested because we are in our league considering a cap of $15M on IFA bids. This will result in many, many ties.  I have heard that tiebreakers include stadium and coaches.  But what does that mean?  I assume hitters prefer hitters parks, pitchers prefer pitchers parks?  Do they care about Major League coaches or Minor League coaches? Position coaches only?  Overall rating or key attribute?  Anybody have any insight?

That's an interesting concept ($15m cap) that I don't believe I've seen before. Would certainly place a premium on coaches, I'd think.

You need specific feedback from anyone who has experience with an IFA cap in their world.  Technically, there's no max bid on IFAs.  The chance of a tie isn't supposed to exist.

Regular free agent players will consider park and position coaches.  Minor league free agents consider your depth chart to see who should be able to offer more playing time.  But I don't know if these factors ever actually come into play with IFAs.

As you said, since the IFA max is not officially part of the game, there is nothing built into the game to break IFA ties.  I learned the hard way that it's whomever has the max offer in during the cycle he signs. i.e. if the cap is $15M and you offer that and are in the lead, if someone subsequently offers the max after you, they will take the lead.

The reason for this WIS explaining to me is that IFAs are programmed to try to get as much money as possible, so even though subsequent bids only "tie" yours, the IFA will tell you someone else is in the lead so you'll up your offer.  Now, this was a few years ago, so I can't be sure it wasn't changed, but I doubt it.

So wouldn't the solution be to offer the "max" over and over again?   As late as possible before the next cycle ran?

Has anybody ever seen a situation where the max IFA bid (in total $ terms) was not the winning bid?  We think we may have just seen an instance of this occurring.  One owner is claiming he bid the max big league contract with a $19.610 bonus and the winning owner bid $19.584 bonus plus big league contract.  However, the IFA was a power hitter and the 19.584 bonus was from a team with a +4 hitter's park.  If that is a true, that would suggest that WIS is assigning some small monetary value to other factors, but it rarely comes into play?   I have a ticket into WIS to clarify but I suspect its unlikely they will give us a clear answer.

BL contract made the difference.   327k x 3 put him over the top with an additional $981, 000 added to his bid. 

Posted by MikeT23 on 3/6/2015 6:38:00 AM (view original):
So wouldn't the solution be to offer the "max" over and over again?   As late as possible before the next cycle ran?

Yep.  I never had a chance to test it, but if what they told me was correct, when you get trumped, just offer the max again next cycle and you should take the lead back.

I've lost a bid in free agency where I was a higher bid than the winner.  So I'm assuming that the same is for IFA as well.  I figured it gave a small advantage to teams with worse records.

I just lost out on an IFA when I offered a higher overall $ amount, but only a minor w/spring training invite, and the other owner offered less money by ~$1 million but included a MLB contract.