any suggestions for setting my budget?

Can you be more specific?

I don't know if he can, but I can. You read through these threads and you discover that you must max out training and you must max out medical and you must max out scouting if you want it to be even remotely accurate, and you have to get the best coaches, and I know it's part of the game, but somebody's BS'ing somebody. You can't max out all those things, unless you've got such a great farm system that whenever anyone hits free agency you just let them walk and bring up the next superstar-in-waiting, willing to play for $343K. So, where do you economize?

Obviously, if your team sucks, you can scrimp on payroll while you're rebuilding. I've heard guys say that advance scouting is a waste of money. Do you max out HS AND college scouting, balance them somewhere short of max, or max one and short the other? I've heard guys say that if you aren't willing to drop $20M bonus on an IFA, don't bother. Well, that means a $26M signing bonus budget. Where do you short if you're going that route? Certainly not international scouting.

I realize that juggling all those issues is a huge part of the game, and it's why we enjoy doing it. I also understand that it's a competition, and nobody who thinks they've "mastered" a few tricks or secrets is going to give those up. But, it sure is frustrating to read through all the threads you can find with the word "budget" and when you're done, you don't know any more than when you started.

Well, I'll help more than that.

Medical-if you have an injury, high medical using 60 day DL will often improve the player. Low medical can be career-ending.
Training-high training helps develop players' physical skills(power, range, etc) and slow regression. Low training does the opposite.
HS/College-I go as high as I can in one and zero in the other. You're only getting 2-3 picks in the top 100.
IFA-the tough one. You pretty much have to have a low payroll in order to compete for IFA. Simply because you'll have to transfer payroll to prospect.
Coaching-depends on how much you want to put into it.

I'll play ball on this (the question part and I think I already know the answer) made a bunch of trades at the deadline to make my team a playoff contender. My teams overall BL salary is over $100 million this year with, I think its $77 million available for next year. I can't sign a lot of the guys I traded for who's contracts are ending because of this. Any way to prevent this in the future?

The obvious answer is plan better. You can issue backloaded contracts to bring back as many as possible. I've often had stupid contacts like 2.7/6/6/6/6 or something along those lines.

Posted by lvnwrth on 12/5/2016 10:35:00 PM (view original):
I don't know if he can, but I can. You read through these threads and you discover that you must max out training and you must max out medical and you must max out scouting if you want it to be even remotely accurate, and you have to get the best coaches, and I know it's part of the game, but somebody's BS'ing somebody. You can't max out all those things, unless you've got such a great farm system that whenever anyone hits free agency you just let them walk and bring up the next superstar-in-waiting, willing to play for $343K. So, where do you economize?

Obviously, if your team sucks, you can scrimp on payroll while you're rebuilding. I've heard guys say that advance scouting is a waste of money. Do you max out HS AND college scouting, balance them somewhere short of max, or max one and short the other? I've heard guys say that if you aren't willing to drop $20M bonus on an IFA, don't bother. Well, that means a $26M signing bonus budget. Where do you short if you're going that route? Certainly not international scouting.

I realize that juggling all those issues is a huge part of the game, and it's why we enjoy doing it. I also understand that it's a competition, and nobody who thinks they've "mastered" a few tricks or secrets is going to give those up. But, it sure is frustrating to read through all the threads you can find with the word "budget" and when you're done, you don't know any more than when you started.

First thing is to replace "must" with "want to." You don't have to have the best coaches. You need the best coaches where they are most appropriate for your team. If you have a bunch of 24-30-yo SP in the majors, a $3M PC is a waste. If your current and near-future SS-CF-CF are in the same age range, you have less need for a top FI than someone whose best defenders are in Low A or are in their mid-30s. Some owners try to have solid coaches up and down the levels; others go for studs at ML and AAA and punt everything else to minimum. If most of your key players are 24-30, Training is an area you could cut back on as those players aren't going to develop or decline much in the off-season. You do not "have to" max out scouting in any way. If you have a top 4-5 pick, yes, you want $20M in HS or College (not both), but if you have a $120M payroll and a top 4 pick, you're doing something wrong. If you're drafting 30th, since you're not likely to get a perennial all-star, you could reasonably put HS or COL scouting at $12-14 and hope to get a few solid players — though you'd have to put more manual labor into the draft rankings.

You economize where it makes most sense to do so for your franchise and preferences. If you have a peak team that needs a $120M payroll, you might risk going low on Medical and hope for good health while you chase a WS, and you might trim all scouting and worry about rebuilding later. If you're an owner who tries to be competitive every year and tries to win by making it through the crapshoot of playoffs with a decent team, you'd never try this approach. If you're an owner who cycles toward super teams, it's inevitable.

When you read "you must ..." just skip whatever comes after as nonsense.

If there's a must, I think it's training. While true that 24-30 y/o aren't going to be affected very much, I don't think anyone has a team of 24-30 y/o. If you have just 1 or 2 legit prospects, you still want to fully develop them.

With regard to the "all in" for either HS or College scouting dilemma, intuition would tell you the overall pool of available high school players should be higher than that of college players (based on sheer number of total high schools versus colleges across the country)
From what I've read at times on here, however, it appears maxing out college instead of HS actually let's you see more players, so zero HS and 16-20 college would be a better bet.
Does anyone want to way in on their thoughts/experiences on this?

The consensus seems to be 200 visible HS players to 300-350 college when budgets are maxed out.

I like to go against the flow and mold my own prospects so I have 20 mill in HS.

Only HS seniors are available as opposed to several college levels.

Good point, Mike. Maybe that is factored in. However, out of curiosity, I looked up some recent data on HS & college baseball programs. It claimed there are approximately 487,000 HS baseball players, and around 57,000 college players.
Even if we say only 25% of HS players are seniors, that would still be around 120,000 or so. (Basically double the entire college total)

I suppose quality could be factored into the equation. You would assume that most college players at least met certain performance levels. Some small town high school teams don't even have tryouts and everybody makes the team. So maybe showing more HS guys with an overall rating of 10-25ish is more accurate, but not worth it.

I just had a draft in which I saw 202 projected prospects, and I'm only exaggerating slightly, at least 100 of them looked only marginally better than tryout camp players. Aside from the possibility that one or more could DiTR, you almost don't want to draft those players at all because they sure don't look worth their slot signing bonuses.

How I go about it assuming a rebuild (which is the case for most new owners): Max IFA/HS/Col/Training, $10M for coaching ($14M if I need FI) zero the rest (if you want $20 training then zero one of HS/Col, I'm a high risk high reward kind of guy). Remaining available coaches are half off 2 cycles before signing period ends. Grab those bargains, sometimes I end up with the highest rated coach at half the league average because nobody seems to understand this. I don't spend more than the min. on minor league coaches because I promote guys quicker than everyone else.

Bare bones player payroll - enough to field a respectable team - can be done with $20-$30M unless you have little to no ML talent. Focus on defense, its underrated by most IMO. You'd be surprised how many wins you'll get with an elite fielding team. Scoop up those waiver wire and ruleV guys.

You should have a competive team up and running in 3 or 4 seasons, more if you're brand new. Add a few more if you've got a bunch of garbage contracts the prior owner/s gave away like they were candy. It can try your patience if you don't have the long game in mind, and even if you do it's frustrating at times.

And if you're new DONT TRADE or sign long term contracts (unless the guy is a stud or you need him to keep your team competitive, if you're not sure ask the forum).

The only things that I consider absolute fixed values are training-20 and ADV-0. Training is obviously super good, universally respected, ADV is almost universally dismissed by top vets. Allegedly WIS "changed" Advanced scout last year to make it important, but I can't even tell what they changed, it still has absolutely no importance or value. Even if you are looking to rebuild and trade some vets for prospects, post a guy in WC to see which teams are interested, and if you've played the game for 10+ or even 5+ seasons, you will have a pretty good feel for which guys to pluck from their depth chart and which guys to leave alone. You don't need ADV to clarify whether a guy is exactly 78 potential or 75 potential, it doesn't matter. [I could imagine an environment where ADV would have value, but it would require at least 5x the amount of DITRs, it would require quad-A boosts, etc etc etc so that teams' depth charts were overflowing with ML-quality guys beyond their 40-man roster limitations for a more comprehensive Rule 5 draft ... but those changes are simply not anywhere near the horizon]

I personally prefer 20 medical because I like roiding my guys up, but it's definitely not for everybody and you also don't need it right away when you're rebuilding (because your ML guys suck and it doesn't matter if they get hurt, right?). Medical is a huge long-term commitment and it's not necessarily productive even when you are in the 15-18 range. I would recommend to either commit to maxxing to 20 or commit to flooring to 0, but anything in the middle is kind of a waste. A lot of good owners do 0 medical and there's merit to the savings, that's literally an entire extra max-contract free agent in the long-run

At the very beginning after rollover, the first thing I calculate is Exactly how much I need for coaches. It's important to forecast. Most importantly, check if your FI is re-signing, that guy is super important and we always want him to re-sign for peanuts. Also, see if your AAA bench coach is worth promoting to the majors because he will only make 600k instead of 2-3 million, that can be a good way to save money. On the other hand, Top-level ML PC and ML HC seem to be worthwhile things to invest cash in. Those are different than bench coach because if you promote your AAA HC/PC those guys still want 1.5 or 2 millionish to start, so you're not saving as much money on those guys.

For payroll budgets and scouting, I have no set strategy besides being as flexible as possible. It's fun to do Moneyball and pay everybody nothing and trade them as soon as they want money, but if I'm contending, I accept that veteran players cost money. After 4 or 5 ML seasons, top draft picks cost big money on their arb deals / long-term deals as well. On the other hand, rebuilding projects require patience, discipline, and restraint when it comes to staying away from stupid long-term ML player contracts, etc. You have to be realistic about which type of team you are and spend or save depending on the circumstances of your roster and upcoming changes.

When it comes to draft budgets, it sounds like I am in the minority here but I prefer spending 20 budget units as 10-10 rather than 20-0 or 0-20. My primary reasoning relates to my preference of letting go of 100% of my type B free agents (you can just go to the list and sign one of several equivalently-rated players for the exact same money, so why not take the free prospect ???), and most of the fringe type-As also. On my SF team this season, None of the guys would re-sign so we picked something like 11 times in the top 100. Those comp picks are super useful for filling out minimum-salary bullpens and benches in the future, as well as grabbing an occasional starting position-player or even an all-star here or there. Additionally and arguably moreso, those comp pick prospects are super-useful for trading to rebuilding teams for solid veterans. It's so much easier to acquire players for prospects rather than prospects for players. It's usually a buyer's market... there's always going to be 8 last-place teams, but there's rarely more than a handful of buyers at any one time, right? Dial up the last place teams, offer a little 2-for-1 action, maybe some 3-for-1 if they're trading me cash or if I happen to like them

Also, you give yourself more budget flexibility across seasons if you split up your draft money. Let's say one season I have no picks (losing no free agents, signing a bunch) and in the next 1-2 seasons I know that I will be losing several, I can go +/- 8 units overall per season instead of +/- 4. If you go 20-0 then you can only go downwards to 16-0 or upwards to 20-4, but if I go 10-10 I can go upwards to 14-14 or downwards to 6-6, depending on my needs. Plus, on the Budget Analysis screen you can see the league averages but you can't see who spends what anymore, so you don't know exactly how the teams picking around you budgeted. If you're pulling from both lists instead of just one, there's a chance that good players are slipping to you from one of the piles whenever all the teams in front of you happened to have budgeted for the same category.

Lastly, IFA is either all-in or all-out. They let you budget up to 20 on prospect but you will typically only need to spend about $5M-$8M on the draft. However, the $12M-15M leftover cash alone is almost never going to net you one of the elite IFAs, so therefore you either need to either hoarde all of your extra player/coach payroll to halve into $5M-$10M extra IFA, or just stay at 5-8 and spend the would-be prospect money for players. For IFA itself, I tend to hover around 10 because that gives me flexibility to polarize my prospect range depending on contending/rebuilding. If I know I am going to have a budget surplus because ML players are leaving, I can go IFA 14 (plenty enough) with prospect of 20 plus whatever extra payroll I chop. If I know I need to budget extra cash for a new fielding coach or ML contract renewals or big free agent signings, I will go IFA 6 with a prospect of 6. IFA is a huge investment without guarantee of success, it can be rewarding but it is the most risky. [In my opinion, IFA is not as good as it used to be ever since they patched up the HTML glitch where ppl could review the entire batch of prospects one-by-one after rollover.] For me, IFA is the "there's nothing else to spend it on" category and is completely impractical when I'm contending