Elite players not getting signed in FA

[bigd51]

I've noticed this twice now in two separate franchise's. In the first one, Carlos Correa hit the market at 27, didn't get signed during the offseason, stayed on the FA list the whole season, and wound up retiring the following year due to "Poor Free Agent Market" reasons.

Now, in the second franchise, I'm almost two months in the regular season (only 3 or 4 seasons into franchise) and Bryce Harper and Josh Donaldson are stuck on the FA list with no suitors... so it's looking like early on that the same thing will happen to them. Donaldson won't be so shocking by retiring because he's 33, but Harper is only 27 and you can't tell me IRL that no team would jump on that in a heartbeat. To hell with the budget.

Right now, I have budgets On and Armor's sliders, so I'm working with a trade frequency slider set at 10. Is their anyway to solve this without turning budgets off?

[KBLover]

Re: Elite players not getting signed in FA

Oh no, not again.

I lost 3 true ace SP in my carryover to this (they retired for "poor free agent market") with only Jose Fernandez signing that year.

It looked like it was be better this year, but now I read your experience and it has me worried again.

You can't edit FAs to make them lower rated so maybe they are cheaper/get picked up.

Only thing I can think of, if your own budget can afford it, is to sign these guys, stash them in A (so you don't use them) and then trade them to teams that need them (or can afford them) for a bag of baseballs. I wish I had thought of this then , though in my carryover, teams were BROKE for the most part...

[Hayman19]

Re: Elite players not getting signed in FA

30 Team Control.

I check before the season starts if there are any decent free agents left(there always are, ranging from 80ish OVR to 70OVR for me) and I go through and release the lowest rated, D potential player on every team and sign a free agent I don't want retiring to that roster spot. You have to do this early on in the season, not sure exactly what the cutoff is but I tried it after 1.5 months into the season and those same players, even though they played the majority of the season, still retired due to "Poor Free Agent Market".

There are always MLB quality players that end up retiring because of this. Meanwhile a 29 year old, D potential, 52 OVR player will take up a roster spot on a teams 90 man roster while these players sit and rot in the free agent pool.

I also go through at the end of the postseason, turn injuries to MANUAL and remove players injuries so they don't end up retiring because of said injury. Too many times do A potential under 25 year old players retire due to a silly injury. Yes, it happens once in a while in real life but pretty rarely, at least with high profile players.

The whole retirement in franchise needs an overhaul. I would love for there to be an option to take retired players and convert them to coaches or even have them come out of retirement. I would settle for being able to reverse retirements so I don't have to plan ahead and do these work around.