So, I signed a relief pitcher to a 1-year $3.2M contract last season...and somehow he's been automatically resigned to my team for $500K during the season rollover. I didn't want to resign the pitcher? What gives?

http://whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerProfile.aspx?pid=2015402

you control him for his first 3 ML years.  any salary of greater than $500,000 for a guy with < 3 years experience will revert back to $500,000 for the next year.

i'm guessing he was a 6-year minor-league FA?

Last season when you signed him (to a ridiculously high amount for this caliber of player BTW), he was a minor league free agent, meaning that he had spent at least 6 seasons in someone else's minors without ever playing in the bigs and was left off the 40 man roster.
So now this season, the system sees him as a pre-arbitration player with 1 year of ML service time. Since he made $3.2M last season, the system automatically gave him the maximum pre-arb amount of $500k.

If you didn't want this guy to stay in your system, you would have had to release him last season.

Got it. I was just filling out the staff last year during a rebuilding season, so I didn't care about salary/quality.

I definitely didn't sign him from the Minor League FA pool last season, so that's probably why I didn't realize his previous Minor League status.

Thanks for the info, I'll look out for that in the future.

Just looked at his history and he had 39 games in the ML 3 seasons beforehand...yet it didn't count as a full ML season. How would a full season be dictated?