You're the owner...select my team's 2006 payroll budget

[Young Drachma]

Ok, I'm doing my Rockies dynasty here and I'm enjoying it just fine without a whole lot of people caring one way or another.

But I want to be fair about the payroll. I don't like how MVP Baseball 2005 does the "budgets" and so, to simulate real baseball there is no cap. Instead, I'll make you all the owner and give you a range (that fits within my story line or at least is plausible) and you'll pick.

There will be other times too, when I'll appeal to the "owners" for specific things and then we'll go from there. I figure it'll counteract the natural staleness that occurs after a while of messing around with your own league, logic and such.

So anyway, here we go.

The Rockies won the NL West. They beat the Phillies in the NLDS, then knocked off the St. Louis Cardinals in 7 games to advance to their first-ever World Series appearance.

Ownership allowed the team to raise payroll to up to $60m (according to my current story) after the team did surprisingly well and was going to contend. The logic being, the fans have waited over a decade for a winner, if this team was the one to do it, they'd better invest and ask questions later.

Well, the team's payroll is $58.3 million. You're the owner.

Do you grant the team a huge increase to continue to contend?
Do you argue that if they could succeed on this modest amount, they ought to continue with a modest increase - say to resign a key player or two - and that's it?

The Yankees lead the majors with $218.6 million payroll. They lost in the ALCS to the Red Sox, who are in the Series again. The Sox are second in the majors with $120.5 million payroll.

San Diego was the lowest payroll team to make the playoffs this year with a payroll just over $56 million. Meanwhile, the numbers 1, 2 and 3 teams in salary all made the playoffs.