Trades & Free Agency

Salary-validated trades

Every proposed trade is checked against your payroll budget, your roster limits at all four levels, and the structure of the contracts involved before it can be accepted. There is no path where you dump an unwanted contract on an AI club without giving up something of real value, and there is no path where an AI club does it to you either. The validation runs symmetrically.

This constraint is what makes payroll planning matter. A bad four-year deal signed in year two is genuinely difficult to escape in year three, exactly as it would be in a real front office. You can eat some of the money, attach a prospect as a sweetener, or wait for the contract to run down — but you cannot make it disappear.

Multi-asset deals

Trades are not limited to player-for-player swaps. A single deal can move major-league players, minor-league prospects from any affiliate, and future draft picks in both directions. Draft pick lineage is tracked, so a pick you acquire in year three and use in year four is traceable back to the deal that produced it.

This opens up the trade shapes that make the deadline interesting: selling a rental veteran for two mid-tier prospects and a pick, consolidating four decent prospects into one excellent player, or buying low on a struggling former star whose current club has given up on him.

Thirty AI general managers with strategies

Each of the twenty-nine rival clubs evaluates trades through an organizational strategy rather than a single league-wide formula. A club in contention with an aging core values immediate production and will overpay for it. A club in year one of a rebuild values young players with years of control and will not trade them for veterans regardless of quality. A prospect hoarder demands a premium to give any of them up.

Because the strategies differ, the same player is worth different things to different clubs, and shopping a player around is a real activity with a real payoff. The AI also initiates — offers arrive in your inbox unprompted, and some of them are good.

Free-agent bidding

Free agents evaluate offers on four axes: total money, contract length, the competitiveness of the club, and whether the role on offer fits how they see themselves. A player with a starting job elsewhere will not take your bench spot for the same money, and a 33-year-old chasing a ring will take a discount from a 95-win team.

Overpay for a declining star and the contract follows you for years under the validation rules above. Identify a player the market has mispriced — a good defender with a poor batting average, a reliever coming off an unlucky season — and you get genuine surplus value.

The luxury tax

Payroll is capped softly rather than hard. Exceeding the luxury tax threshold is allowed and sometimes correct, but it costs escalating money that comes out of the same franchise finances funding your stadium and your operations budget. Only the major-league payroll counts toward the threshold, so minor-league depth is a way to build quality without tax exposure.

Mid-season market

The free-agent pool stays live all season. When a rival releases a useful veteran, you can claim him. Injuries reshape the market weekly, which means the marginal value of the same available player changes considerably between April and July.

The transaction log

Every trade, signing, release, waiver claim, promotion, and demotion across the entire league is recorded and browsable, permanently. No move quietly disappears. When you are eight seasons deep and wondering how a rival assembled its rotation, the log has the answer.

The trade deadline guide walks through valuing your own assets before you start making calls, and the roadmap tracks what is coming next for the GM AI.