This is one of the best OOTP tutorials that I've seen. One of the things I still haven't figured out as well as I would like to is how to negotiate long term deals with players. The players' demands are usually extremely high compared to what they're willing to settle for. How do you make sure that you're not paying a player much more than you could be paying him? It feels like sometimes I overpay for a player. He might ask for 250 million for 8 years, I offer 200 million for 8 years and he accepts, and I'm wondering if I could have gotten away with paying him just 150 million for 8 years. I also don't really know the best way to do player options, team options, and player opt out clauses. Recently I've gravitated towards overpaying players a bit more to get the last 2 years of the contract to be team options. In the past, I found that often giving a player an opt out clause or player options was a fantastic move if I wanted to sign a guy for 2 or 3 years, but not 6 or 8 years, because they really like to opt out of contracts unless they've really done poorly recently. But I haven't been doing that as much recently because I haven't really been signing players that I only wanted for 2 or 3 years that wanted a 6-8 year deal. Recently I've mostly been giving position players long deals during their first or second year of arbitration that buy out their first 2-6 years of free agency. And I no longer give a pitcher more than 3 years guaranteed in a deal. I'll do a 5 year deal, but only if the last 2 are team options. But when a position player hits free agency in his early 30s, and he's been a fan favorite, been to multiple all-star games, and he's still good, that's when I feel like I'm overpaying to get short deals with team options. When a guy has been on my team 10 years and been to 5 all-star games, and he's been around for 10 years because he's the perfect fit for my team, I don't want to let him go, but I don't want to give a 33 year old a 5 year deal. I feel like I more often overpay in this situation than when I gave him a 7 year deal with the last 2 years being team options when he first reached arbitration at age 26. It's partly sentimentality that makes me want to keep these stars in their 30s on my team, but it's also because I really enjoy seeing them stay on my team long enough to make it onto the top 10 lists for my team's all time records. I'm glad that I paid a 35 year old guy (that for the last 10 years had been my third baseman) 30 million for 1 year (with a 15 million team option for the next year that he declined) to be my DH, even though he put up only like 2 WAR that year, because he got his 500th HR for my team. It was expensive paying 30 million for a 2 WAR DH, but it was worth it to me to get a guy with 500 career HRs for my team. But I didn't try to pick him up after he declined his 15 million player option, and then he went on to have one year with a negative WAR for the Yankees before retiring.
Thanks for the kind words, Gabriel. Contract negotiations can be tricky. Some players will cost more to re-sign and then when they hit free agency, their demands drop. For other players, the opposite is true. Some of this has to do with player personality and how much they want to stay with your team. In some ways, that mirrors real life, where you don't know the true demands of the other side and you have to find common ground. So, always good to have your own ballpark estimates of what you'll pay for different quality and types of players.
@@pfholden I was just able to sign a player for a 3 year contract for 25 million for the first year and a pair of 20 million team options with 5 million dollar buyouts after he had requested a 5 year deal for 28 million per year. I guess it helped a lot that he was near the end of his 16th year as my team's second baseman (and I'm still giving 30-65 million to a 37 year old second baseman). I feel like I've mastered a lot of parts of OOTP, but negotiating with players after their 30th birthday is something where I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing. That's a good point about their personalities. I know that the personalities for some players literally says that they aren't loyal to the team or they're only in it for the money. I should pay more attention to that when trying to negotiate with my players.
