Signing Draft Picks
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Can someone please explain how exactly signing draft picks work?
You can have two guys with 100% scouted. The first guy, with 45% motivation, could take under his demand. You could then have another guy with 65% motivation refuse to take well above his demand.
How exactly does this work?
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This is another area where SDS's game code for Franchise never did reflect real baseball properly and they have refused to fix it.
This draft signing thing is just another way for the game code to spice things up and make running your team more difficult that it should be. I have seen the game code have a four-year college senior drafted in the first round and refuse to sign. That's not happening in real life because the player has nowhere else better to go.
No player in his right mind is going to forego an MLB contract to play in the Nippon League, Korean League, or even the Latin leagues.
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The developer in the franchise promo video said "everybody I've talked to says franchise is too easy". We only get 6 or 7 draft picks and then have to solve a puzzle to sign them.
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What I have found is that if your team is loaded with talent in the minor leagues, then signing your top draft picks becomes nearly impossible, even if you offer them double their slot value. I've seen this many times when I tried to manually sign players in the draft. I would offer them way more than their slot value, and they immediately "reply" in the game code that they are breaking off all negotiation!
So, yes, this is a cheap software coding "solution" to a perceived need to punish success to make things more difficult. That's what is going on here.
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I was the number 3 farm system at the time of my draft and signed every one of my picks.
I played through 3 seasons in 2025 and signed every one of those picks and had a top 5 farm system the entire time.
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I was the number 3 farm system at the time of my draft and signed every one of my picks.
I played through 3 seasons in 2025 and signed every one of those picks and had a top 5 farm system the entire time.
Could you give me some pointers how to sign some of these guys?
Is there some internal rng at play that makes some guys sign right away and others not sign until the deadline?
Do some players have to have their motivation maxed out? If so, why?
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Can someone please explain how exactly signing draft picks work?
You can have two guys with 100% scouted. The first guy, with 45% motivation, could take under his demand. You could then have another guy with 65% motivation refuse to take well above his demand.
How exactly does this work?
The motivation means how interested they are with signing your team. For example a player with 52% motivation has to go multiple days of negotiations, A player with 70% can have a contract negotiated with on the first day of negotiations.
That's my best summary of that.
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Can someone please explain how exactly signing draft picks work?
You can have two guys with 100% scouted. The first guy, with 45% motivation, could take under his demand. You could then have another guy with 65% motivation refuse to take well above his demand.
How exactly does this work?
The motivation means how interested they are with signing your team. For example a player with 52% motivation has to go multiple days of negotiations, A player with 70% can have a contract negotiated with on the first day of negotiations.
That's my best summary of that.
I understand how to raise the motivation, what puzzles me is how some players with 50% will sign right away. Some with 75% still won't sign.
How is this determined? Is there something to look at or is it RNG?
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I was the number 3 farm system at the time of my draft and signed every one of my picks.
I played through 3 seasons in 2025 and signed every one of those picks and had a top 5 farm system the entire time.
Could you give me some pointers how to sign some of these guys?
Is there some internal rng at play that makes some guys sign right away and others not sign until the deadline?
Do some players have to have their motivation maxed out? If so, why?
I make sure as many of the players I draft are players I scouted by spreading the scouting out around my draft pick locations. I usually get 4 players I scouted so immediately I have players well above 50% that are easily signed day 1. The others I just work until they get over 50%. The Dodgers have terrible draft money and I still get them all signed.
