Off Topic
If you’re going to run a team that practices Wave Winning (build, collapse, rebuild), then Cap management really isn't too … um … complex. Generally you’re marshalling young players to peak at the “right” time, and then you spend as much as you can on a couple Superstars as needed (or even overpay for Very Good Players). Flags fly forever, and in the end as your team falls to the bottom you enjoy running a satisfying fire sale and reap chips to build again.
That’s good. Again, there is NOTHING wrong with Wave Winning.
That said, even teams at the very bottom of the cycle can, in my humble opinion, benefit from thinking about their budget and salary cap (and other team’s budgets and salary caps) for ways to leverage them.
The Value of Cash vs. Budget
If you’ve listened to my podcast about BBA finances you know where I stand on this. Cash is grand, but Budget rules. Cash is short term. Budget extends out. And cash is not that hard to come about. If nothing else, 10 Participation Points is $1M. (aside, I hate the idea of spending points on cash, but it’s certainly useful).
The YS9 Way to Sustained Winning says that all steps will always be taken to preserve our budget. This is important because (as noted in the Draft and Player Acquisition segment of this diatribe) once you’re winning, you will never draft in the upper two thirds of the draft ever again. So, since the game’s development engine can only do so much with junk, your root stock of Very Good Players have to come from somewhere. Budget well over Cap is the core of your ability to Sustain. It’s from those funds that you can afford the wild-ride of the International Free Agent market. Or afford to entice your Superstars to stay in the fold with big bonuses.
To be clear, though, this is also the reason it is important to win at least a little bit as you’re early in the build. Spend your cap to add revenue, then that revenue builds budget. Sure, you may lose money for a year—or not—but in the BBA (or I’d guess any league with a hard cap) if revenue is growing up, then things are going just hunky dory.
It is possible, I suppose, with great development luck, to keep the wheels on a Sustained Winning cycle with lower budgets, but I can’t bank on that. Our Salary Cap is $110M. Personally, I’d roughly put the mark for where a team can actually leverage that Budget Over Cap mark at about $130-$135M. If you can get your Budget to $145-$150M, then you’ve got some wiggle room. If you’re at the bottom of the financial barrel like YS9 was when I took over, this can take some serious time. For reference, I bought some budget in my first year, but in 2026, my second season with the Nine my budget was $89M. It grew to $110M in 2027. $120M in 2029, where it stayed until 2032 when it moved to $130M. It rose to $134M the next year, and only in 2034 (nine seasons) did it hit $150M.
How Fast Can It Go?
The Ys9 grew its winning percentage over those years, and to be clear that was the Wave Winning kind of cycle. I used the nine seasons it took to get to $150M to routinely tend my minors and draft in at least a few pretty decent spots. So the pipeline was pretty fair by that point. So really, I’d say that 2034 was roughly when the team moved officially out of Wave Winning and into Sustained Winning mode.
There was a problem though, in that I hadn’t staggered things particularly well, and in 2037—three years later—the salary cap bit us, and we had a bit of a mass exodus. I still thought we would sin out, but then 2037 itself saw three starting pitchers go down with big injuries and Lucas McNeill posting exactly zero WAR. We won only 80 games and did not go to the playoffs—hence did not build bonus cash. What were the odds, right? 100%, it turns out.
Bottom line: the team’s finances crashed, and the budget dropped to $140M. This meant 2038 was a make-or-break year. If revenue dropped again, our run was effectively over, or at least sidelined for several years while we got our financial mojo back under us.
All turned out well as YS9 had a solid season that included a post-season run and the requisite playoff ousting. The budget bounced up a couple million, and we were back in control. That said, the experience has given me this frame of reference:
Anyway, there’s that.run time wrote: A team successfully transitioned to Sustained Winning team can probably absorb one bad beat season.
Revenue is Gold
To reiterate from an earlier chapter, Revenue is the most important thing simply because in an OOTP league with a hard salary cap, this year’s revenue is next years (and forever’s) budget. You MUST have a budget over $110 simply to spend to cap (remember we started this whole thing in the $80Ms!), and you really need at least $125M as a budget simply to cover draft and coaching staff expenses. So, yeah, $130M in revenue is probably the point where you can begin to act like a team that might successfully enter a Sustained Winning phase.
So, learn how to fiddle with ticket prices, and focus on stadium sizes. For what it’s worth, the YS9 Way is being feed by roughly $80-$85M out of our stadium each year these days.
This Budget is My Budget, This Budget is Your Budget
Here’s a weird way of looking at the world, but I find I like it.
With the hard salary cap, it turns out that Other Team’s Budgets can be your resource. It doesn’t happen very often, but there exist moments when I want to dump a salary without paying for it. Releasing the player would remove them from counting against cap, but still hit budget. If I have other plans, I need to save that space. So I look for a team with “excess” budget over cap and give them the player along with a prospect or something else they care about (since we’re the Brewster, bonus cash is possible). That team then can release the player—essentially paying “X dollars” for whatever I give them.
Regardless, the whole point in these cases is that my plan for Sustained Winning needs the resource called Budget over Cap more than it needs the prospect I send away.
I should note that sometimes I make a move like this and the team decides to keep the player, which is possibly a mistake and possibly not…regardless, the point of the matter is that this is a case where YOUR budget over Cap can be MY budget over cap.
Interaction of Cap, Budget, and Bonuses
After a team gets past that $130M budget threshold, a new tool opens up—that being the use of bonuses in contract clauses. Oh, sure, you can give bonuses before then, and it’s probably a good idea to consider low-grade bonuses if you think it will sign a player. But early in the Sustained Winning build, big bonuses can create problems. OOTP, you see, doesn’t really plan on players making their bonuses, so a big lump sum expense at the end of the year can set one’s head aback at times. After your budget is $130M, though (or maybe $125), the risk of such a thing isn’t too bad—unless you build up many such bonuses. In which case this is an area of risk to the plan.
The Nine working plan, for example, has $19M due to players as bonuses this season. That could rise to $23M if certain things happen. That’s dangerous. If, for whatever reason, we did not got to the post season this year, our financial structure would take a pretty big hit. The number drops to about $5M this year, however, so the risk is (1) very short-term, and (2) is low in that I’d expect to go to the playoffs.
I took most of this risk on when I decided to spend a bucketload of that capital on making Sawyer Slizz open to the idea of a 1-season contract. He’s making $13M, but plus a $6M bonus that he’s already hit. In other words, I decided to overpay a high-end Very Good Player for a 1-year span.
Remember: No such thing as a bad 1-year-contract.
This is much better than the situation I was in during that 2037 debacle, where I had contracts with big bonuses loaded up across several year. Risk was at DEFCON RED during that time period, but I felt it was a risk I needed to take to keep the bandwagon rolling.
A major warning to growing teams, though. To my count, we have 14 teams with budgets of under $120M (which suggests revenues are projected to be in that range). Putting that $6M bonus on the records to sign Slizz could be a major problem unless you’ve thought through the whole thing because your out-year budgets do no take that bonus into account. If you have enough cash on hand (and Bonus Cash, as I’ll get to next), it could work out. Otherwise, the loss of money could kneecap you for a bit as you scramble to make up the shortfall.
Bonus Cash and Whatnot
In the BBA we have this fun little way of skinning money off the top of the revenue stream, that being the $40M max Bonus Fund. Any profit we make over the $20M cash on hand level goes to the Bonus Fund until $40m is achieved.
This is a resource that is probably not maximized by most teams—though I admit I don’t really know. I’m maybe denser than the usual bear, but it took me awhile to figure out that I should never have a balance in this account if my cash on hand is less than $20M. In other words, if I have money in the Bouns Fund account, and my cash on hand drops from the $20M max the game manages to (say) $13M, I should move as much of $7M from the Bonus Fund to Cash on Hand as possible.
Cash on Hand increases what I can spend this year. Bonus funds do not.
So, yeah…
That said, now that the team is running full bore, my primary goal is to earn enough money to keep funds in there. I don’t care if I max it out at all, but that’s my emergency fund. It’s nice to have a bit of bankroll, there—so when I’m doing my out-year financial simulation, I’m basically using the Bonus Fund account as a litmus test for if the spending plan is sustainable. Bonus Funds > 0 means the plan works. Bonus Funds < means the plan is risky.
Like Ted, I don’t like risky plans. Oh, I’m not quite as stodgy as Ted. I’ll do them sometimes. But I don’t like risk in the big picture.
Impact of the Cap
The cap is, in my opinion, the only thing that keeps this (or any) OOTP league from a situation where the best teams will simply run away and hide. Without that cap, and without it set “fairly” low in the scheme of things, it wouldn’t be nearly as difficult to have kept the wheels on for this long.
I say that because over the past four or five seasons, the cap has forced me to roll some great players off the roster—and has forced me to use many of the big resource toolbox that I’ve built up. The cap created my entire strategy of acquiring a plethora and big bullpen arms with the idea of my pen being mostly cheap and very good. The cap has required me to take those roster risks of big bonuses. The cap has made me get really creative at times to keep things together.
It may be going too far, but simply having this kind of salary cap is what probably drives more of a Wave Winner attitude here in the BBA than a Sustained Winning attitude, because honestly, the cap is what requires a team that’s transitioned fully into Sustained Winning to have to work this hard.
If you are going to become a team that transitions to Sustained Winning, you will always feel the hot, sordid breath of the salary cap on the back of your next. So prepare to get inventive.
- - - I think that’s all I really have to say about tricks and ploys around budgeting and salary cap and whatnot. I’m not sure where I’ll go next, maybe team trainers and coaches. That should be a quick one, I suppose. I mean, how much can you say about those things?
I guess we’ll find out.
