There is going to be some stiff competition for Free Agents this season. My team (Yankee Stadium) was the #1 seed in the NL with 104 wins and the WS winner (Wrigley Field) won 103 games and was the #2 NL seed. My hitting coach is an 85 and his is 82. There are a couple other teams with money to offer but most didn't win more than 80 games. The original team is going to be a factor for the first guy but he only won 77 games last season and his HC is a 76.
Our rules stipulate a maximum season salary of $15M and we are allowed a max signing bonus of $5M. There are two guys I would like to offer max deals to. One is asking for 4 years @ $9.5M per season and the other is asking for 3 years @ $10M per season. Am I better off to offer 4 years @ $15M with a $5M bonus or just offer 5 years right away? Same thing for the other guy, is 3 years that he is asking for better than 5 years or should I just go to 5 years initially?
Any thoughts or recommendations would be helpfully because I don't want to lose out on either of these two guys and would be crushed if I lost out on both. I will be a serious WS contender with or without them but I have just enough money to get both and my pitching staff would really appreciate the offensive support of these two guys. Thanks.

if there are similar bids out there, neither guy will sign for a few (real-life) days, so i think you can throw the shorter contract out there and see how you fare.  of course, if i'm in your league and reading this, i might adjust my bidding strategy...

To top it off. The guy who signed him is now trying to peddle him to me for my best SP prospect. That is why they should not have taken the previous seasons record out of the logic. I can see crappy teams doing this to add prospects and it just isn't close to realism.

I'm sure there's a reason for it.

Player Option?  NTC?

No he offered the exact same contract. The only thing I can think of is that his park advantage is slightly more than my FI advantage. Does anyone know why they took out the previous seasons record as one of the criteria? Was it replaced by the players former team logic?

Who said they took out the previous season's record as a factor?

Did he resign with his former team?  Because they did say that they increased the loyalty factor quite a bit.

This is all I see:

• When comparing free agent contracts of the exact same value we are now incorporating loyalty with their previous franchise. If a player has been with a franchise for more than 5 seasons that franchise will have a significant advantage during the negotiation process.

I looked it up in the FAQ section of help. "When a free agent has multiple exact offers of any value at the ML level the tiebreakers are as follows: relevant IQs of the coaching staff and ballpark. If the players previous franchise is also bidding on him, then that franchise will receive a loyalty bonus. When the coaching staff is used to break the tie position players will look at the hitting IQ of the hitting coach and the fielding IQ of the fielding coach. Pitchers will look at the pitching IQ of the pitching coach and the bullpen coach. In cases where the offers are still tied and the coaching staff has been factored in ballpark is used to determine which franchise the player will sign with. Pitchers always want to pitch in a pitchers park, while position players will always want to play in a hitters park." Looking at this logic again I think he should have chosen my franchise before the ballpark factor even came into play but I guess not.

MikeT that is what I thought too when I read the update but apparently that is not the case as you can see from my previous post.