I like Colby's idea of the some percent down and some percent up, but I like it even better tiered like kdoc proposes, because it's not the same to take 25 percent down when jumping from 1 to 2 years, than when jumping from 4 to 5 years. For example a 4 year offer of 20 mil means 80 mil guaranteed money, while the 5 year 15 mil bid that would be needed to surpass it is 75mil guaranteed for more years which wouldn't make any sense. I would propose:

25 percent from 1 to 2
20 percent from 2 to 3
15 percent from 3 to 4
10 percent from 4 to 5

and also the tiers should apply to raising salaries for less years and I would propose

10 percent from 5 to 4
20 percent from 4 to 3
30 percent from 3 to 2
40 percent from 2 to 1

An example would be:

X offers Player 2 year contract for 10 mil each (20mil guaranteed)
Y offers 1 year contract for 14mil (14mil guaranteed)
X offers 2 year contract for 10.5 mil each (21mil guaranteed)
Z offers 3 year contract for 8.5 mil each (25.5m)
W offers 1 year contract for 16.5 mil (16.5m)

and so on. This will allow for plenty of bidding and guarantees that no player will receive less guaranteed money for more years.

Maybe teams should be allowed to keep one prospect of their choice from their team and the rest will go to the FA pool. This way they can keep their top prospect without filling their EDR with similar value players. I also think the EDR transfer window should remain open through FA, but only this one time.

The value of freddy sanchez's contract does not appear on my roster. I think that's the only thing.

we could use a formula to calculate total value for the contract, but I also have an interesting proposition, how about giving a winning team from last season a small advantage over a losing team? that would make it even more realistic. I would suggest this:

Total Value = winning factor * (# of years * yearly contract value + yearly contract value ^ 1.3)

I would suggest that the winning factor should be something like this:

win percentage  (minimum)         winning factor
     1.000                                      1.15
      .750                                       1.10
      .600                                       1.05
      .500                                       1.00
      .400                                       0.95
      .250                                       0.90
      .000                                       0.85

This way it will be a small difference, but it may be more realistic. I would also suggest that the hometown team for each player always get the multiplier of 1.1 regardless of it's record.

The Jays new Trade Block is:

P Beam, T.J., $0.5m (P-2011)
P Bullington, Bryan, $0.5m (P-2011)
P Burres, Brian, $0.5m (P-2010)
P Mills, Brad, $0.5m (P-n/a)
P Hayhurst, Dirk, $0.5m (P-n/a)
MI Sanchez, Angel, $0.5m (P-n/a)
OF Coats, Buck, $0.5m (P-n/a)

Not many big names left, but may be willing to move Scott or Halladay for the right price.