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- Owning and GMing a pro team
-
- CONTENTS
-
- 1. Owning a team
- a. Budget
- b. Ticket prices
- c. Stadium
-
- 2. General Manager
- a. Contracts
- b. Cutting players
- c. Free Agents
- d. Trades
- e. Drafting
- f. Minor Leagues
-
-
- 1. Owning a team
-
- When you take over a team, you will be in full control. The bottom line of
- your performance, however, will be in your role as owner: the person who
- pays the players and earns the proceeds. If you do well, you will have more
- money to spend in future seasons. If you do poorly, you will be hamstrung
- by budgets in the future.
-
- The income and expenditures of a team is fairly straightforward. For income
- you earn a fixed amount of money through TV revenue, and a variable amount of
- money though ticket sales. The amount you are expected to earn in ticket
- sales is displayed during the ticket price setting screen. The expenditures
- are rent and player salaries. These amounts are determined for a full
- season, not including playoffs. If your team makes the playoffs, you will
- have to pay additional salaries for each game, but will make more in ticket
- sales and TV.
-
-
- a. Budgets
-
- At the start of every season, the program will determine a total budget for
- your team. This is the total amount that can be spent on player salaries,
- bonuses, and given away in trades for the season. This limit can never be
- exceeded, and you may find that you cannot sign all of your players if you
- are spending too much money.
-
-
- b. Ticket prices
-
- Before the offseason (when the draft occurs and free agents are signed), you
- are asked to set your team's ticket price. You are shown the estimated
- income with as you change the ticket price, so in general you should just
- choose the price with the highest predicted income.
-
-
- c. Stadium
-
- Stadium options can be set in baseball and soccer, where you can change
- certain aspects of the field to alter how the game is played.
- Baseball: size of field, turf type (grass/turf)
- Soccer: pitch length and width, grass depth
- Depending on how you want to build your team, you can set these within
- certain restrictions.
-
-
- 2. Duties of the GM
-
- The general manager, or GM, is the person responsible for making sure the team
- has good players. The means to accomplish this are drafting, free agent
- signing, and trades. Times to do these are obvious during the offseason, but
- can also be done during the season by selecting "GM" after any game.
-
-
- a. Contracts
-
- At the start of the offseason, you get to negotiate a new contract with all
- returning players whose contracts expired at the end of the previous season.
- The contract negotiation screen you use here is similar to those you will
- use for free agent bidding and contract renegotiations or extensions.
-
- When entering a contract, you will have a screen showing what "level"
- contract the player will accept, how much money you can spend, and options
- for entering the contract. The "level" is how valuable the contract is,
- and is equivalent to the annual salary with no bonus. By adding a bonus
- you can decrease the amount you are spending while keeping the level the
- same (but of course you guarantee payment to the player, even if he is
- cut). The screen defaults to paying the player his desired amount and a
- 30% pro-rated bonus, which is usually what you will want to use.
-
- There is a limit on the duration of a contract, and it is five times the
- contract level (round down, but of course never less than 1). So a contract
- with a level of $0.96 million would have a maximum length of 4.8 years,
- which rounds down to 4 years. This is the only time in which you might
- want to pay a player more than he is asking, if you want to tie him up
- long-term.
-
- The commands for changing the contract are shift-number and number to raise or
- lower the salary at each year; shift-b and b to raise or lower the signing
- bonus; l to adjust the salaries so the level will equal the level the player
- is asking for; and s to view the player's stats. If you do not wish to sign
- the player to the level he wants, you may cut him by pressing c.
-
- You can also renegotiate and extend contracts throughout the offseason and
- the season. If you are renegotiating a contract, you must offer the player
- a deal which is at least as good as his current deal AND at least as good as
- he thinks he deserves. If you are extending a contract, you have the same
- limits, plus the fact that the signing bonus is fixed and the duration of the
- total contract must be no more than 10 years. (You can't put an eight year
- extension on a five year contract, for example.)
-
-
- b. Cuts
-
- Cutting players is rather simple. You select who you want to cut and he
- is removed from your roster. If the player had a signing bonus, you
- will still have to pay it unless they get signed by another team.
-
- At the end of the offseason in all sports, you will be forced to cut your
- roster size down to the level for the season. This size is 45 for
- football, 50 for baseball and hockey, 44 for soccer, and 12 for basketball.
- Cut players in football and basketball will go to the training squads, and
- will return to your roster next season. Cut players in the other sports
- will become free agents.
-
-
- c. Free Agents
-
- Free agency is actually broken into two periods. The first is before the
- first draft round, the second is after the first draft round. During the
- first period, a free agent selected to be signed must be bid on. After the
- team selecting the player makes the bid, all other teams (including computer
- controlled teams) will place bids on that player. If a team does not wish
- to make a bid, the GM may simply bid 0. The free agent will then go to
- the highest bidder.
-
- When making free agent bids you will see a screen much like the contract
- negotiation screen, with a few minor exceptions. First is that instead of
- having a player-dictated salary level, you may change the level of the salary
- you are entering. Note, however, that the level it begins at is the level
- the player is asking for, and he will not sign to a lower contract. The
- other difference is that, instead of pressing c to cut the player, you may
- press Esc to cancel the bid.
-
- Immediately before the first draft round, the computer-controlled teams will
- bid on any players they want, but the human-controlled teams will be left out
- of the bidding. So it is important to sign any players you want before you
- start drafting.
-
- After the first round of the draft, any team may claim free agents by simply
- selecting them. There is no bidding; the free agent is signed for his listed
- salary for one year. This is also how free agents get signed during the
- the regular season. Computer-controlled teams will only attempt to sign after
- you have made any cuts. This automatically happens after the first game (due
- to the final cuts), but can happen after any game or immediately before any
- draft round.
-
- Since a team may never have more than a set players at any time, you may wish
- to cut players, which can be done with the cut option. The cut screen is
- also a good way to view your team during the offseason.
-
-
- d. Trades
-
- Trading is quite simple. You merely select a player you wish to trade away,
- and the players you want in return. If this trade is with another human-
- controlled team, the game will ask to confirm the trade. If not, the
- computer will inform you if the trade is approved by the computer GM. Note
- that players who are involved in trades (successful or not) will be
- automatically moved to the bottom of the roster during the season, so you may
- need to change the depth charts afterwards.
-
- About three-quarters of the way through the season, you will pass the trading
- deadline, after which point no trading is allowed until the next offseason.
-
-
- e. Drafting
-
- At the beginning of the season, a new group of college seniors is created,
- which are formed into teams and play games to generate stats. (This is
- why season initialization may take some time.) These players are then
- drafted into the league. Drafting is done normally, with the teams with
- the worst records getting the best picks and the teams with the best
- records getting the worst picks. Ties are resolved by poll ratings.
-
- If any of your players have retired or been cut, you may need to draft
- players in certain positions, but the computer will inform you of that need
- so don't worry about making sure you have enough players in each position.
- You also get an extra draft round for each player that retires. The number
- of draft rounds you get depends on the number of players you have before
- drafting. The maximum roster sizes are 50 in football and soccer, 55 in
- baseball and hockey, and 15 in basketball.
-
- If you do not wish to make draft choices yourself, you may let the computer
- choose for you by selecting "Computer" when your team's pick comes up.
- This is useful in the later rounds, when there are no good players left.
-
- Note that in soccer, there is no draft. Instead, randomly generated
- players are added to your squad at the start of each season, presumably
- out of your junior program.
-
-
- f. Minor Leagues and Training Squads
-
- In Manager, Hockey, and Soccer, there is a full minor league team for each
- major league team. After training camps, you must decide which players you
- want to send to the minors. At any time during the season, you can bring
- players back and forth between the squads in the GM menu. After the season
- end, all players return to the major league roster to make offseason moves a
- bit easier.
-
- In Coach and Basket, players cut after training camps will instead head to
- the training squads, where they spend the season playing pickup games.
- (You may notice that there is a pause after the last game of the day; these
- games are being played then.) As with minor league players, they will return
- to the team at the end of the season. The difference is that you cannot
- recall them to your team; once sent down they remain there for the season.
-
- Following the cuts to minor leagues or training squads, training camps will
- be run. Training camps generate sample stats for the players, and frequently
- improve their skills in one or more areas.
-
-
- copyright (c) 1991-2000 Andy Dolphin
-