MLB:2006
by 989 Studios
"Business Management" FAQ
by Mr. Kim D. Rodieck
also known in the gamefaqs.com world as "economiester"
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Table of contents:
-version history
-introduction
-explanation of cost structure
-checking your financial health
-pre-season business management
FRANCHISE GOALS
RESTRUCTURING YOUR ROSTER
RELEASING PLAYERS
RESTRUCTURING PLAYER SALARIES
HIRING A STAFF
TRAINING AND REHABILITATION
TELEVISION CONTRACTS AND PRIMARY ADVERTISER
BILLBOARD ADVERTISERS
LOANS AND BANKING
VENDORS AND FACILITIES
TRANSPORTATION
-in-season business management
PLAYER ADVERTISING
TEAM ADVERTISING
TICKET PRICES
CONCESSION PRICES
PARKING PRICES
ADDING VENDORS
ADDING NEW SEATS
-end of the year business management
SHARED REVENUE TAX
RESIGNING PLAYERS
TRADING PLAYERS
SETTING NEW ROSTERS
AMATEUR DRAFT
LOOSE ENDS
-conclusions and final words
-reader's Q&A
-thanks
-contact info
-legal stuff
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Version History
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Versions:
v.1.00 - 3/15/05 - first version contains the basics of
profit building
v.1.01 - 3/22/05 - corrected a few spelling and syntax
errors
v.1.11 - 4/13/05 - added some observations about
promotions, ticket prices, and parking prices.
v.1.21 - 6/5/05 - added some observations in several
sections. added a few new sections
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Introduction
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Thank you for checking out my FAQ page for MLB 2006. I
earned my BA in economics from the University of Washington
in 2005, so I am naturally drawn to MLB 2006 because of the
incredibly deep franchise mode that this game offers. I
spent a lot of time playing MLB 2005 and figuring out the
rules for how to make a profitable franchise, and I used
that knowledge as a foundation for earning profits for MLB
2006.
Rather than making this FAQ simply about different business
aspects of the game and presenting them in no particular
order, I have decided to organize these aspects into
different parts of the baseball season. This way, if you
want to start a new franchise, you can follow the steps
contained in the preseason sections. As your season
progresses, you can check in on the in-season section, and
then you can check out the end-of-the-season section to get
your self ready for the next season.
Before reading this FAQ, let me just remind the reader that
although this FAQ certainly will give you the tools
necessary to maximize revenues, this is not necessarily a
cost minimizing FAQ. There may be some areas in the game
where you may want to spend significant money, and there is
nothing wrong with that. Some teams, like the Yankees, have
very high player salaries, and this will reduce your
profits, but you can still be very profitable even with
such costs. With regard to costs, this FAQ will teach you
how to manage cost...not minimize it.
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EXPLANATION OF COST STRUCTURES
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Understanding this section is very important to having a
good understanding of how costs are paid.
First, almost all costs and revenues are tracked on a daily
basis. In other words, you will have to pay out money for
salaries, training, rehabilitation, and other things for
every day of the season (including the playoffs if you are
skilled enough to make it to the post season). For example,
if you have a player who has a yearly salary of
$10,000,000... then you will have to pay $55,555 per day to
that player. This same rule applies for all players as well
as coaches and scouts. Training and rehabilitation follow
the same rule. If you decide, at the start of the season
to, devote $30,000,000 to training, then that will cost you
$166,667 per day.
The above principal is very important to making decisions
about hiring new personnel(which is discussed later). Here
is how to view costs with a simple example. Suppose that
you have a hitting coach who is being paid $1,500,000 per
year. You decide that you want to hire a new hitting coach
who wants $2,000,000 per year. What is the cost of the new
coach? The answer is $500,000 because that is how much more
money you have to spend in order to upgrade your coach. But
we want to view this upgrade in terms of daily costs. Since
the cost of the upgrade is $500,000, that added amount
spread out over the period of (approximately) 180 days is
just $2,778 extra per day.
Costs like those mentioned above have to be paid every
single day of the season, no matter what. You will notice
that your balance sheet will be in decline when you have a
day off or if you are playing games on the road. That's
because you are paying the cost of salaries and such during
this time.
When you are playing home games, you will be able to
collect revenue from concessions, tickets and parking. This
is when you earn your profits. You are still paying out the
costs mentioned before, but you will also be earning
revenue from which costs will be deducted. The difference
between revenue and cost is your daily profit. Just
remember that you can only earn profits when you are
playing at home.
The cost of things like new vendors, additional seats,
training and rehab facilities are one-time costs, and you
do not pay for these over a time period(aside from
maintaining the facilities of course).
Transportation is a cost that is paid in full at the start
of every year. This will be discussed more later.
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Checking your Financial Health
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There are two ways to check the financial health of your
franchise. The first way is by checking your balance sheet
and the second way is to check your funds(which I refer to
in this FAQ as cash-on-hand). Let me talk about the balance
sheet first.
Your balance sheet has two major categories which are
INCOME and EXPENSES. Your NET INCOME is income minus
expenses. The balance sheet is just a year to date snapshot
of your profits(or losses) for the year. The only real
reason to be concerned with the balance sheet is that it
can be used as a tool to determine how much money in
profits you are earning per home game. The net income
figure is only meaningful at the very end of the year since
it shows how much money was added to your cash-on-hand, but
let's break down the balance sheet so that you know where
everything that you do in your franchise is logged.
INCOME
FACILITIES: money earned by selling concessions, tickets
and parking.
LICENSING/AD SALES: money earned from TV, billboard and
primary advertising contracts.
SHARED REVENUE: this is the rebate that you get at the
start of the year from the shared revenue tax.
LOANS: If you took out a loan, then the amount of that loan
is logged here.
EXPENSES
STAFF SALARIES: this is where the salaries of your coaches
and scouts is logged.
TRAINING/REHAB: the amount of money that you spend on
training and rehabilitation is logged here.
FACILITIES: When you spend money on new vendors, new seats,
training facilities, rehab facilities, the cost will be
logged here. The cost of transportation is also logged here
at the start of every year.
MARKETING: Money spent on player advertising, team
advertising and promotions.
BANKING: Money spent on repaying any loans that you have
taken out.
SHARED REVENUE: At the start of every year(except the very
first year), the amount of shared revenue tax paid is
logged here. The shared revenue expense, for you, will
almost always be higher than the shared rebate resulting in
a large negative balance sheet at the start of the year.
PLAYER SALARIES: Money spent on player salaries.
Whenever you play a home game, you will notice that your
net income is rising. That's the income that you earned for
a home game minus the expenses paid. When you add a new
facility, like a vendor or additional seats, your net
income will fall because your added an immediate expense
without adding any immediate income.
In my opinion, cash-on-hand is the best way to judge your
financial health. This tells you how much money you have to
add vendors and seats and such as well as your ability to
absorb the hit from the shared revenue tax and
transportation costs. The balance sheet simply tells you
how much money was added to the amount of cash-on-hand that
you started the season with.
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Preseason Business Management
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This is a very important section. Here, you will lay the
foundation for a well run business that will affect the
rest of the season and beyond.
FRANCHISE GOALS
Before you even play your first spring training game in
franchise mode, you will be required to sign on to a list
of goals that you must achieve within a span of 4-6
seasons. When you start up a new franchise, a randomly
generated set of goals will be created as well as the time
frame in which these goals must be completed. Some goals
may be reasonable, but some may not be reasonable. For
example, the requirement that your stadium must host an
All-Star game may be unreasonable to you since you do not
have much control over which city is awarded the honor of
hosting the game. Therefore, if the goals that you must
accomplish seem unreasonable, then exit franchise mode
without saving, and try, try again until you have a
reasonable set of goals. Keep in mind too that the
difficulty of your goals is linked to how well your team
did during the 2004 season. This means that the Red Sox and
Cardinals will generate more difficult franchise goals than
will the Mariners and Diamondbacks.
One goal that you may have problems with is the possible
goal "Draft and All-Star potential player". This is more
appropriate for end of season business management, so I
will discuss this issue in that section. This particular
goal is not very unreasonable, and you should be able to
accomplish it even if you have the last pick in the draft.
RESTRUCTURING YOUR ROSTER
Baseball games tend to do a pretty good job of putting the
game on the market with very up-to-date rosters. However,
sometimes the game is released too early to catch some late
deals. You can correct this very easily with an automatic
roster update if your PS2 is online. If your PS2 is not
connected, then take this opportunity to shuffle the
rosters around a bit should you choose to do so.
RELEASING PLAYERS
Unlike MLB 2005, you cannot save money by simply releasing
players that you do not want. In this version, if you
release a player, you will have to pay the remainder of
that player's salary. What a bummer! So keep in mind that
releasing players is not a good way to save money. Instead,
what you can do is just allow their contracts to expire as
time moves on. In other words, don't resign bad or old
players! They will retire or move on to another team.
RESTRUCTURING PLAYER SALARIES.
Before doing this, you should have restructured your
roster(if you felt like doing so). At this point you should
have the roster that you want to start the new franchise
with. Now, what you need is a piece of paper and a pencil.
Write down the name of your best players and hot prospects.
Also make note of the length of their contracts and the
payment schedules. SAVE YOUR GAME. Now release those
players into the free agent pool and attempt to resign
them. You should start by finding the contract length that
each player is comfortable with and then find out the
lowest possible salary that is acceptable to them. Write
that number down and compare it to the contract that the
player starts out with. If the contract is much more in
your favor, then you will want to target that player. Now
LOAD YOUR GAME and restructure the player's contract. This
is crucial to saving money long term and here is an
example. In my franchise with SEA, Adrian Beltre was in the
last year of his contract(for those of you who are confused
about contract length, it is expressed as a fraction such
as 3/4 or 2/6 and such. A fraction such as 5/7 means that
the player is in the fifth year of a seven year contract,
and 2/9 means that the player is in the second year of a
nine year contract). I was worried that at the end of the
season, I would have to pay dearly to resign him. So I
released him and tried to resign him. Fortunately Beltre
accepted a 10 year contract at a grand total of about
$15,000,000, meaning that his yearly salary fell from
$11,000,000 to about $1,300,000. This particular example is
actually rare for a player. Most players want a yearly
salary close to their default salary, but you can find some
players who will take massive pay cuts. You will also
notice that as you keep doing this, the game imposes a
limit on how many players salaries that you can
restructure. You will notice that your payroll will keep
increasing and is approaching the budget limit that the
game imposes on you. The reason why this is happening is
because when you release a player, you do not have to
compensate him with any money right away, but when you
resign him, the amount of money that the player will
receive for the first year of the contract is added to the
payroll. What this means is that you are limited in how
many players you can release/resign. So make wise decisions
and focus on only your best players who are in the last
year of their contract. The other problem that arises from
this is that since your available payroll room is limited,
so is your ability to trade for players. If you have cap
room of, say, $1,000,000, then you cannot trade for a
player that has a salary of $1,200,000.
At the end of the season, the game grants you an increase
in your payroll budget by x%. The increase is directly tied
to your team's performance. After doing a simulation of the
entire season, my Mariners made the playoffs, but they were
defeated in the first round. That level of success granted
me a 5% increase in my total payroll. However, when I
played a full season, and won the World Series, I was
granted a 14% increase. In the latter example, my players
swept almost all of the major awards, and I am just simply
unsure whether winning major awards has an effect on
payroll increase, but I suppose it can't hurt. What I am
sure of, is that winning the World Series will give you a
bigger increase than you would earn if you were defeated
earlier in the playoffs.
I would write a another FAQ listing optimal contracts for
each player, but the game randomizes players contracts when
you start a new franchise which makes it impossible for me
to tell you whom to release and resign and for how much.
**********************
****GLITCH WARNING****
**********************
I have run across a glitch that, for some reason, will wipe
out your coaching staff, and it is connected to salary
restructuring. When ever you release a player and resign
him, he will be on the team but will not have a spot in the
line up. In fact, if you release a starting player, that
spot in the line up will be left blank. This happened to me
when I released some minor leaguers and resigned them. This
left my AAA club with an invalid line up and the game gave
me the option of AUTO FIXing the problem, and that I think
is what caused the problem because when I checked out my
coaching staff(after hiring the best that I could get), I
noticed that new managers were assigned to the Mariners and
all of their stats were at or near zero. You can avoid this
problem by manually setting the rotations and lineups of
your AAA and AA clubs. Go to LINE-UP and toggle between
your MLB, AAA and AA clubs with the right analog stick and
make sure that each club has a valid rotation and line up.
You should do this before you play your first game of the
season. In fact, you should first restructure your players
salaries, then set the line ups and rotation for your
teams, and then hire coaches. This should prevent the
glitch from happening.
HIRING A STAFF
If you feel that personnel such as coaches and scouts are
not important, then that is your choice. I happen to like
having the best personnel that I can possibly get, so I
don't mind spending a bit extra to get the best coaches
possible. If you read my explanation of cost structure,
then you will see why hiring the most expensive coach will
not make a huge dent in your profit margin. I would mention
that if you are planning to maximize your training budget,
then having the best pitching, hitting and development
coaches is critical to maximizing the effect of training.
This will also keep fans happy to know that their favorite
players are in good hands. Scouts, in my opinion, are FAR
less important than coaches, so use your discretion when
hiring scouts.
TRAINING AND REHABILITATION
Training your players to become better hitters, pitchers
and fielders is something that I feel is very important in
the long term. Good training can turn a young, average
player into a superstar within a few years, and it can turn
a superstar into a Hall of Fame caliber player. I like to
maximize my training budget. This keeps the players very
happy and you will start to notice that your young
prospects are developing into great players. Training is
very costly, but I think that it is worth it. Part of the
reason is because your team may have some older players who
will be retiring in a few years. It is a good idea to have
an up and coming prospect(who's contract has been
restructured heavily in your favor) training for a few
years for the chance to fill that void. Perhaps you decide
to keep costs down by setting all training levels at 50%,
and that is fine. Having a maximized training budget is,
just in my own opinion, a good thing, but it is very
costly.
Rehabilitation, on the other hand, I like to set at zero.
The reason why I do this is because player injuries
relatively rare and if, may the Baseball Gods forbid, a big
time player goes down with an injury, then you can either
1.)reset and replay the game, or 2.) just replace that
player in the line up with a prospect or bench player.
Rehab is only useful, it seems, when injuries happen, but
injuries are rare enough so that the cost of fully funding
rehabilitation is not justified. You can also change the
game settings to set injury frequency at zero if you like.
However, even if you set injury frequency to zero, there is
still a chance that your minor league players will be
injured. Changing your "user game options" does not have
any effect on a game, unless you are actually playing that
game. This rule applies to major league games as well.
TELEVISION CONTRACTS AND PRIMARY ADVERTISER
Television contracts and your primary advertiser are almost
identical in the way that you should chose them. You should
be primarily concerned with the length of the contract. The
shorter the contract, the better, which is especially true
for TV contracts. The reason why you should want a short TV
contract is because as your team becomes a real winning
dynasty, more options and better deals will become
available. When better deals begin to pop up, you do not
want to be stuck in a contract for several more years while
a much better contract is waiting. Once you have all TV
deal options open to you, go ahead and start choosing on
the basis of yearly income rather than length of contract.
Choosing a primary advertiser is a little different from
choosing a TV deal because you want to optimize both length
of contract as well as yearly income. Again, short deals
are better because better deals may be offered in the
future, but don't sacrifice too much income just for the
sake of a slightly shorter contract. Keep in mind as well
that with both TV deals and primary advertisers, they will
put a requirement on the contract that you must fulfill in
order to receive full payment. For example, some primary
advertisers may require that provide a certain facility or
score an average of X number of runs per game. Just make
sure that you take note of the requirement before you sign.
BILLBOARD ADVERTISERS
This one is pretty obvious. When you sell billboard
advertising, a certain company will pay you to advertise in
your stadium. Unlike in MLB 2005, where you just sold
advertising space for a certain number of weeks at a fixed
rate, MLB 2006 allows you to sign long term contracts at an
annual, or semi-annual rate. Again, short deals are better
because better deals may come along in the future. In
general, the rate at which advertisers will pay you is
directly a function of attendance. This means that it is a
good idea to sign deals that expire in midseason. As
attendance keeps rising, advertisers are willing to pay you
more. Therefore, I think that the optimal length for a new
franchise is to choose a deal that expires in the middle of
2006. By that point(if you have been winning), your stadium
should be 90-97% sold out each game and advertisers will be
paying out a lot to advertise in your stadium. Once rates
are high, then you can start locking in long term deals.
LOANS AND BANKING
This is one of the most crucial aspects of starting off
your franchise on the right foot. There are several
purchases that you will have to make at the start of the
season. When choosing a loan, you want to do two things.
First, choose a loan amount that fully covers the cost of
all of the investments that you want to make. Secondly, now
that you have figured out the appropriate amount for your
loan, you need to choose a bank. The optimal choice is the
bank that will loan you your desired amount and provides
for the lowest monthly payment that you can get. There are
two reasons for this. First, payments are made on the first
day of each month. Since you are trying to keep your
balance sheet high in the black as well as maximize your
cash-on-hand, keeping this payment as low as possible is
crucial. The second reason is that you will be paying off
this loan during the off season. This means that in
addition to being charged for transportation and the
revenue sharing tax, you will also be charged for loan
payments made over the months of the off season. The shared
revenue tax is a real wallet buster, so you don't want to
make the situation worse by having huge loan payments
accumulate over the off season. Also, you can only take out
two loans at a time. With this particular loan, you don't
have to perpetually hold on to paying this loan. In fact,
it is good to pay off the balance of the loan a season or
two from now, but I will get to that later.
VENDORS AND FACILITIES
Now that you know the rules about taking out a loan, you
have to use that loan to purchase some assets. You can
purchase whatever you like, but here are my suggestions for
what to get.
batting cage 2,000,000
face painting 100,000
playground 2,000,000
hot tub 5,000,000
ice cream guy x20 200,000
soda man x20 200,000
peanut guy x20 200,000
aerobic room 10,000,000
auto pitcher 5,000,000
spa room 6,000,000
massage room 4,000,000
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TOTAL 35,000,000
This should give you one unit of each asset, except for ice
cream guy, soda man and peanut guy for which you should
have a grand total of 30 units each.
I know that I said that funding rehabilitation is not a
good idea, so why would I recommend adding a spa room and
massage room? It just keeps the players happy and from now
on, you will only have to spend a small amount money at the
end of every year to keep it upgraded. Anyways, it is my
opinion that the optimal loan is a $36,000,000, ten year
loan from Fin's Bank which produces a monthly payment of
just $399,674
TRANSPORTATION
Read my lips! Do not EVER upgrade your transportation. This
is the biggest waste of money in the game. You may be
tempted to upgrade when you see your players whining and
complaining that they have to ride on a cheap bus, but
don't worry about it. Sure, riding on a bus is a negative
for player morale, but you can more than make up for that
by being a winning team. The rule here is that there is no
substitute for victory. Your players will put up with
having to ride on a bus just as long as your team is having
a great year. There is another temptation that you should
avoid. As the season progresses, you will notice that the
cost of an upgrade keeps falling day by day. Don't be
fooled. The reason why the cost of a transportation upgrade
keeps falling is because transportation costs are
automatically paid in full at the start of each year, and
that billing pays for the entire year. Therefore, when you
upgrade your transportation near the end of the season, you
think that you are getting a great deal, but the cost is
low because you are only leasing that mode of
transportation for a few weeks, not a full season. The cut
off date for transportation upgrades is about three weeks
before the end of the regular season. By that point, you
will be tempted by the very low cost of the upgrade.
However, if you do it, then you will not be able to reverse
it until the start of next season. When the off season ends
and the regular season begins anew, you will be charged for
that one year lease right off the bat. If you upgraded to a
team jet just before the season ends, you will be hit with
a bill of $200,000,000! You can get a refund by
downgrading, but why bother? If your franchise has been
wildly profitable, then you will certainly be hit with a
massive shared revenue tax and you WILL start next season
with a large negative balance sheet. I will get more into
this later, but the tax has to be paid from your cash-on-
hand. The same rule applies to transportation costs. The
amount of the transportation lease will be paid out of your
cash-on-hand. If your cash-on-hand is not sufficient to
cover your higher mode of transportation, then you will
automatically be downgraded to a bus.
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In-Season Business Management
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This section is the most vitally important part of
maximizing your revenues throughout the season. Selling
soda, beer, popcorn, caps,tickets, parking and such are
going to be your main focus of making money. Some of the
sections here are long, but they are thorough in helping
you understand the revenue maximizing process.
PLAYER ADVERTISING
One way to get more fans to come to your stadium is to
advertise your players to your fans in order to tickle
their baseball bone. The benefit of advertising is that it
slowly, but steadily increases the support and loyalty of
your fans. This in turn has a positive effect on
attendance. Of course, when it comes to increasing
attendance, there is no substitute for victory. Winning is
the best way to increase attendance, but advertising will
give your franchise a little extra push. When it comes to
advertising players, you cannot directly choose whom you
will advertise. Instead, you will choose a marketing
strategy based on marketing your team's All-Stars,
sluggers, rotation, fielders or rookies. From there, the
game will assign a player who fits that description. You
should start by setting the budget for advertising. This is
a yearly budget so, unlike MLB 2005, you will not have to
constantly buy advertising time as the season moves along.
Personally, I like to set the total budget to it's maximum
level, which comes to a grand total of $13,200,000 per
year. I think that it is worth it. Keep in mind as well
that once you begin the season, you can always change this
amount, as well as the marketing strategy. If you have
committed to a maximized advertising budget, then you
should probably stick with it, but you should never stick
with the same marketing strategy. This can be changed
independently of the budget, so you should be mixing this
up as the season moves along with different strategies and
different players.
TEAM ADVERTISING
You can treat this identically to player advertising, but
there is a slightly more dynamic way in which you should
approach team advertising. The maximized advertising budget
is equal to that of player advertising, and you can change
the marketing strategy independently of the budget. This is
a major improvement over MLB 2005 because you can change
your strategy on a single days notice. This means that if
you have a winning streak going, you can use that as part
of your marketing strategy as soon as possible and end your
"Keep the Streak" ads as soon as your winning streak ends.
Keep in mind though that since media rates are different,
they also have different levels of effectiveness, so keep
an eye on the marketing strategy and keep it updated
according to your team's performance.
PROMOTIONS
The most useful way to think about promotional give-aways
is to think of them as a type of advertising. My strategy
is to continuously drop a cheap promotion in the middle of
every home stand. The reason why I treat promotions as a
type of advertising campaign is that promotions will raise
the support of your fans in the same way that advertising
does with creating continuous happiness. In my opinion, it
is preferable to use several cheap promotions as a means of
slowly and steadily increasing fan support rather than
spending tons of money to give your team momentary bursts
of fan support. By using this method, your fans will be
constantly kept happy by looking forward to the next
promotional event. So my goal is to constantly keep fans
looking forward to an upcoming promotion. I would go about
this by dumping one cheap promotion right in the middle of
each home stand. How many units of each cheap promotional
item is up to you, but I like to keep the quantity in the
range of 5,000 - 10,000 units. For more expensive items, I
would lower the range to 2,000 - 5,000. I must stress that
the promotion should be scheduled IN THE MIDDLE of a home
stand only. Do not schedule the promotion on the first or
last day of a home stand. The reason for this is because it
will distort the price optimizing technique that I will
explain shortly.
One gamefaqs poster, theaub, reminded me that doing too
many promotions is simply a bad idea. He's right. Some
people may want to do a massive amount promotion by doing a
promotion every day, and sometimes very expensive ones as a
way of quickly building fan support and thus quickly
increase attendance which leads to more money. That
strategy is nonsense because maximized fan support does not
necessarily mean that attendance will be maximized.
Attendance is a mathematical function of several
independent variables like spending on advertising, ticket
prices, concession prices, variety in advertising and
promotions, the time space between promotions, team winning
percentage, total team wins, position in the standings,
etc.......There are simply too many variables for
promotions to be a huge factor in increasing attendance
partly because all of these variables are weighted
differently. In other words, nobody will care about having
promotions every day if the ticket prices are too high.(On
a side note, the only time where I personally was compelled
to attend a Mariners game due to a promotion was during
"Buhner Buzz Night" when the Mariners still played in the
Kingdome and Jay Buhner was our star right fielder. Every
fan who was willing to get his or her(and there were
several women) head shaved in the parking lot got free
tickets to the game.)
I have to make one very important note about free ticket
give-away promotions. The game lists the cost of this
promotion as zero. Do not be fooled! The cost of this
promotion is very real and, as ticket prices begin to rise,
this could end up being one of the most expensive
promotions that you can do. Although the game says that the
cost is zero, you are in fact paying a cost for this
promotion since you are forfeiting the revenue that you
otherwise might have gained. Let me illustrate with a
simple example. Suppose that you have a lemonade stand.
Each cup that you sell costs you $0.25 worth of lemons,
sugar, and ice, not to mention the paper cup. You are also
charging $1.00 per cup of lemonade. Therefore, your
expected profit per cup is $0.75. Your best friend stops by
and you offer him/her a free cup. Did your give away cost
you nothing? No, since you obviously had to pay for the
ingredients that went into making that cup of lemonade.
Then you might say "So the cost of my give away was $0.25."
Wrong again. The true cost of giving away that cup was in
fact $0.75. Since each cup earns you a profit of $0.75, you
just forfeited $0.75 worth of profits! That is what you
truly lost by giving away a cup of lemonade. The same
principal applies to a free ticket give away. The cost of
giving away tickets is the money that you COULD have earned
by selling them. The more tickets that you decide to give
away, the more expensive this promotion will be. When
tickets are given away, I am not sure which tickets are
being given away. They could be cheap seats or very
expensive ones. Even if the game distributes the free
tickets strictly according to price(cheapest seats given
away first), then the remaining tickets will then be given
away for the second cheapest, and then third cheapest and
so on. This would mean that the cost of the give away will
rise in an exponential trend. Here is a hypothetical,
totally made up chart to illustrate what I mean:
SEAT # OF SEATS PRICE COST TOTAL COST
bleacher 1,000 5 5,000 5,000
LF view 1,500 6 9,000 14,000
RF view 1,500 7 10,500 24,500
LF general 10,000 8 80,000 104,500
RF general 10,000 8 80,000 184,500
IF box 4,000 10 40,000 224,500
home plate 3,000 12 36,000 260,500
In this totally made up example, you can see how the true
cost of this promotion can build up. By giving away 4,000
tickets, you incurred a cost of $24,500 by giving away the
tickets rather than selling them. The cost is then borne by
you in the form of reduced profits when you forfeit the
revenue from those tickets much in the same way when you
forfeit cash-on-hand to spend money on buying baseballs to
give away during a promotion. This whole example is a great
illustration of the economics concept of "opportunity
cost". The true cost of anything is the value of the
alternatives that you forfeit. This applies to other give
away promotions as well. If you give away 5,000 programs at
a cost of $2 per unit, then you have to pay $10,000 out of
pocket. However, the hidden cost, which is very real, is
the profit that you forfeit by giving those programs away
as opposed to selling them. So your true cost in that case
is $10,000 plus the profits that you forfeit.
TICKET PRICES
It is very important that you find the optimal ticket
prices before you find optimal concession prices. The
reason for this is that the number of sodas, hot dogs,
pretzels, etc. that you sell are a function of two factors:
the price of the good and the number of fans in
attendance(which is a function of ticket prices). By
optimizing prices of concessions before optimizing ticket
prices, you may end up distorting the profit maximizing
equilibrium. Now, let's optimize ticket prices. The way
that we will do this is with the save-test-load method.
When you begin your franchise for the very first time, SAVE
your game right before your first home game. Now, on a
sheet of paper, write down each seating section along with
the given ticket price for that section. Now, simulate your
first home game and take a look at how much revenue that
section generated. Write those numbers down for each
section. Remember that there will be a bit of variability
in the revenue generated for each section, but not too
much. LOAD your game so that you are still facing your
first home game. In order to find out what the optimal
ticket price is for each section, play around with the
prices a bit. Try lowering some prices and raising others.
Then, write down the change in income that the price change
caused. LOAD your game again and keep playing with the
prices until you find the revenue optimizing price for each
section. Once you find out the optimal prices, load your
game again and set your prices accordingly and SAVE your
game. You should still have NOT played your first home game
because you now have to move on to testing concession
prices. Before we do do that, I have to go into how to
continuously keep ticket prices optimized.
The above method should be used ONLY when you begin a brand
new franchise. This should not be used during the season or
at the first home game of your second season, or third, and
so on. There is a very distinct method that you should use
when optimizing prices from now on.
The save-test-load method will still be used, and the best
time to do this is on the day before the first game of a
home stand. The difference is that rather than maximizing
revenue, the objective from now on will be to raise ticket
prices as high as possible without having a major drop off
in attendance. Remember, as your team becomes a winner, you
will attract more and more loyal fans. These loyal fans
will not care if the ticket price goes up by one dollar.
They are willing to pay that little bit extra. What we are
testing is how much fans are willing to pay before they
start deciding that the price is just not worth it. That is
when you start to see a drop off in attendance, and we do
not want to do that because those fans are also buying all
sorts of other stuff in your stadium.
Now, SAVE before the first game of a home stand. Before
simulating the next game for the test, make a note of total
attendance to-date for that section as well as the price of
tickets for that section. Now simulate the next game. Make
a note of the change in attendance. Now LOAD your game and
raise each ticket by one dollar. Simulate the game and
check to see if there was any significant drop off in
attendance. There will probably be some, but we do not want
any significant drop off. If the drop of is very small,
then you should raise the price because the raise in price
will off set the drop in attendance. Therefore, just keep
raising the price as high as possible up to the point where
price increases have a minimal effect on attendance.
**** important note ****
Remember in the section about promotions when I said that
promotions should be scheduled for the middle of a home
stand rather than on the first or last day of a home stand?
The reason why I recommended that was because when you are
doing the save-test-load method to test ticket prices, as
well as concession prices, those promotions might end up
distorting the true effect of price changes if a promotion
is scheduled for that same day. In other words, when doing
this test, we want to do it under controlled circumstances
in order to find the effect of changing the value of a
single variable. When a promotion is scheduled on the day
that you are doing the price test, you will be, in effect,
testing the impact of two variables: price and promotion.
We just want to measure the impact of price only. This is
why I stressed that optimizing ticket prices should be done
before optimizing concession prices because the amount of
concessions sold is a function of concession price and
attendance. By optimizing ticket prices first, then the
variable of attendance will be held relatively constant
which means that you should be able to then test for just
one variable, i.e. concession prices.
For those of you who have an understanding of mathematical
notation, let me put it this way:
concession profits = f(A,Pc) where A is attendance and Pc
is concession price. A = f(Pt,D,Pr,X,Y,Z) where Pt is
ticket price, D is money spent on marketing, Pr is
promotions, X, Y and Z are other minor variables. To solve
the problem f(A, Pc), A has to be solved for first. To do
this D, Pr, X, Y and Z should be held constant so that they
are considered constants. With Pt being the only unsolved
variable, Pt can be solved for subject to the constraint
that Pt*A= ticket revenue is maximized. At that point, A is
solved for and becomes a constant in f(A,Pc). Since A is
constant, Pc becomes the only variable and thus concession
prices are easily solved for.
CONCESSION PRICES
Once again, the save-test-load method will be used to test
what prices will be optimal for all of the different
concessions. When attempting to optimize ticket prices, we
were most concerned with tracking the number of tickets
sold. With concession prices, we can ignore quantity sold
and just focus on revenue generated. The method to finding
optimal concession prices is almost identical to finding
optimal ticket prices. First, SAVE your game on the day
before the first game of a home stand. On a piece of paper
with several columns, write down each concession item in
column one. In column two, write down the current price of
the concessions. In column three, write down the revenue
earned to date for each concession. Now simulate the next
game. In column four, write down the new revenue figures
that the home game generated. What you want to take note of
is how much the cumulative revenue increased by. Now LOAD
your game. Now you have a chance to play with the prices a
little bit. Of course you should try raising prices prices
first, so try raising each price by one dollar. Now
simulate the next game and write down the new revenue
earned to date figure in column five. LOAD the game and
compare column four and column five. If column five
increased significantly over column four, then the price
increase was justified, and you should run another test by
adding two dollars to the original price. If there is
little or no difference between column four and five, then
THE PRICE IS OPTIMIZED AT THE NEW PRICE. If, however, the
number in column four is greater than the number in column
five, then OLD PRICE WAS THE OPTIMAL PRICE. Now that you
loaded your game and you are back where you initially
started, go ahead and set and set the optimal prices for
the appropriate goods. Now SAVE your game so that you don't
have to keep adjusting those prices. They are optimized and
you do not have to mess with them for a while. Now go ahead
and used the save-test-load method to find out the optimal
price for the rest of the concessions. I should note that
some of the very expensive items like jerseys, signed bats,
signed balls, and thing like that(the goods that are sold
at Jerseys n' Junk) are not very sensitive to price
changes. Instead of using one dollar intervals when testing
these goods, use five or ten dollar intervals until you can
narrow down the range in which the optimal price will be.
Hot tub tickets seem to have a strange pattern and do not
follow the trend of other high priced goods. You will just
have to do a bunch of testing for this one.
Keep in mind also that fans may complain about the prices
which will be indicated by a red arrow and an angry comment
about the prices. Do not worry. If the prices that you find
are the revenue maximizing prices, then stick with that.
Sure, this may hinder fan support a little bit, but
remember that there is no substitute for victory. Keep your
team winning and your fans will forgive high prices. Also,
as time goes on, the arrow next to that concession will
turn from red to green. By the end of your first year,
almost all prices will be maxed out and the arrow will be
green. In fact, I was able to max out the price on about
half of my concessions after one month. After about two
months, I was able to max out the price on about three
quarters of the total concessions which makes testing much
faster. By the All Star game, I had maxed out prices for
every concession except for beer.
PARKING PRICES
This is a tough one. The reason why it is so tough is
because the revenue data that you get for different prices
is so volatile that it is almost impossible to nail down an
optimal price. Therefore, my advice is to set the highest
"green level" price. The green level price refers to the
little arrows that appear next to the price of concessions
and such. A red arrow means that the price is too high for
most consumers, and a blue arrow means that the price is a
real bargain. A green arrow means that the price is in the
normal range. As the season moves on, the top green level
price will increase, so just check in once in a while to
see if the top green price has been raised.
Finding optimal parking prices is very difficult because
the revenue as a function of price varies tremendously. For
those of you who are familiar with statistical lingo, there
is very high variability around the mean. Keep in mind that
at the start of the season, you are not going to be selling
out the stadium. This means that the parking lots will be
only partially full. However, once your stadium begins to
fill up to capacity, then the parking lot will also begin
to fill up as well to capacity as well. Once your stadium
begins to consistently sell out, then the variability will
decrease as well.
ADDING VENDORS
As more and more fans come to your park, the lines at food
and drink stands will get longer. The longer people have to
wait, the less concessions you are actually selling. In
other words, you are not supplying enough to meet demand.
This is an important concept because if the price of some
concessions is maxed out, then price increases can no
longer increase revenue for that section. You have to
increase the quantity sold. The way to do this is to add
more vendors at strategic times. First, let me explain how
vendors earn more money for you. Each vendor that you will
add will act like a perpetuity. A perpetuity is a type of
investment(sold mostly in Great Britain) whereby a borrower
will pay you a fixed amount of cash every year for an
infinite number of years. The value of a perpetuity is PV =
C/r, where PV is the present value, C is the annual cash
flow and r is the interest rate. To illustrate, suppose
that the market interest rate is 10% and you put $100 into
a bank account. Every year, the bank will pay you $10. If
you withdraw that money and wait another year, the bank
will pay you another ten dollars. If you do this year after
year, the bank will pay you $10 year after year. This game
treats the addition of new vendors in almost exactly the
same way. However, instead of a 10% interest rate, the
interest rate in this game is about 1%. This rate, however,
is not a yearly rate, it is a daily rate. When you add a
new vendor at just the right time, You will notice that
your cash flow will increase by an amount equal to
approximately 1% of the total cost of the vendor. In other
words, if you add a new vendor at a cost of $1,000,000,
then your cash flow will increase by $10,000 for every home
game.
As I was mentioning, the addition of a new vendor has to be
strategically timed. So how will you test whether the time
is optimal? That's right, it's the old save-test-load
method. THIS IS THE LAST TIME YOU WILL USE THE SAVE-TEST-
LOAD METHOD. Whew! The best time to save is the day before
a home stand. The reason for this is because if it really
is the right time to add a vendor, then you want to capture
as much of that new cash flow as possible. You should have
first tested for optimal ticket prices and concession
prices, in that order. SAVE your game on the day before a
new home stand. On a piece of paper, draw several columns.
In column one, write down the name of the vendor along with
the number of existing vendors. In column two, write down
the revenue earned to date for that particular vendor (By
the way, test one vendor at a time. Also, vendors have
their own set of financial data, so this information is not
coming from concession data). Now simulate the home game.
Check out the new revenue earned to date figure and write
that down in column three. LOAD the game. Now add one
additional vendor. Pick any one of them that you want to
test. Now simulate the home game again and write the
revenue earned to date figure in column four. If there is
no significant difference between column four and column
three, then you should not add that vendor. This is
indicating that demand has not increased, so you do not
need to meet it with additional supply. If, however, the
revenue earned by that set of vendors increased by one
percent (or more) of the cost of the vendor, then you
should add the vendor. This is an indication that demand
for certain concessions has increased or is not being met
by current supply, so the new vendor is filling the excess
demand. Just keep doing this for different vendors and see
how many you can add within reason so that you are
supplying any excess demand. Some vendors are relatively
cheap, and it may be difficult to spot increases in cash
flow to that vendor. For instance, a vendor that costs
$100,000 should yield, approximately, an extra $1,000 per
home game.
</pre><pre id="faqspan-2">
The obvious question is "Should I save up for the really
expensive vendors to add a lot of cash flow or should I
slowly build?" My answer is that the choice is up to you.
You will have to make that choice based on your current
financial situation, but you should always keep an eye on
your cash-on-hand figure. One good way to go about this is
to take out an additional loan to finance the purchase of
the most expensive vendors. This is advantageous if you are
just starting out your franchise. You should have taken out
a loan to finance some purchases when you just started your
franchise, which means that you have room for an additional
loan. If you notice that adding a Jerseys n' Junk will
increase your cash flow early in the first year of your
franchise, then take out a new loan (while following the
rules of banking explained earlier), and buy that vendor.
This will barely disrupt your cash-on-hand, and you have
just increased cash flow. I do not recommend doing this
after your first or second season. The reason is that you
will have built up sufficient cash-on-hand to comfortably
finance the addition of any new vendor and you will not
need to bother with extra loan payments. Ultimately, the
rule is that you should add vendors whenever possible, just
make sure that your financial situation can handle it.
Let me also note that the best time to add the most
expensive vendors is as close to the start of the season as
possible. The reason for this is because of the interest
rate. As I noted, the return on your investment should be
about 1% per home game. This also means that the annual
return is 82%! This means that when you add a Jerseys n'
Junk that costs $10,000,000 at the start of the year, your
investment will have returned $8,200,000 at the end of the
year! Add the most expensive vendors when you can, but the
absolute best time to do it is right at the start of the
second, third or fourth season and beyond. This way, you
can capture all of that return.
As the season moves on, and you check up on your franchise
progress, you may notice that your fans are complaining
about long lines to buy concessions. If they are saying
this in the middle of a home stand, or near the end, then
just wait until the start of the next home stand to run
another test. If your financial situation allows you to do
so, then you should be testing vendors at the start of
every home stand, regardless of what the fans say. If your
tests show that adding another vendor does not add more
revenue right away, then don't add it. If an additional
vendor is profitable, then add it if you can. My advice on
dealing with fans is that you should not be reactionary to
the comments of fans. If an investment in an additional
vendor is profitable, then do it. If it is not profitable,
then don't do it. Keep in mind also that the absolute
maximum number of a particular type of vendor that you can
have is 30. That's why you can't add any more ice cream,
soda and peanut guys to roam the stadium, but there should
be plenty of room to add more food stands, Jerseys N' Junk,
etc.
You may also notice that even when you add an additional
vendor, your balance sheet may not show the revenue
increase that you expect to see. For example, if adding an
extra Jerseys N' Junk shows that you can earn an extra
$100,000 per home game, that extra revenue may not be
reflected in the net revenue change that you get from
playing a home game that same day. I am not sure why this
is, but my theory is that it may take a few weeks for "the
market to clear." It may take some time for the new supply
to equal demand, but trust me, you will see those profits
by the end of the year
ADDING SEATS
In MLB 2005, I found it impossible to totally sell out any
seating section when prices were maxed out. In my
experience, after building fan loyalty and becoming a
winning franchise over a few seasons, the highest that I
could get prices to go (if I wanted to sell out any
section) was the maximum price minus one or two dollars. I
do not know yet if this is the case for MLB 2006, but I
will find out and I will post that result. Anyways let's
just work from MLB 2005 rules for now. Once I did find the
highest optimal price, I was able to sell out every seating
section in Safeco Field. This is the optimal moment to
begin adding new seats. At this point, the stadium is
filled to capacity and you can no longer generate
additional ticket revenue by raising prices. Also, the
increase in demand for concessions will start becoming
stagnant which means that your rising cash flow will start
to level off. Stagnant demand means that you will find less
opportunities to add vendors. First of all, you do not
necessarily need to sell out EVERY section. However, the
price should be maxed out or nearly maxed out, and that
section should be consistently selling out. Now start
adding new seats. The amount to new seats is up to you. You
can add the maximum number of seats for that section or you
can do it 50 seats at a time. I prefer to add 100-200 seats
at a time so that I can check to see if that section is
still selling out after the new seats are added. If the
section is not quite selling out after adding the new
seats, then I can wait a few weeks until the section is
selling out again. As you keep adding new seats, the price
may simply be too high to sell out a section where seats
have been added. The case may be that at a price of X, only
Y% of the seats can be sold. At that point, it may pay off
to drop the price by one dollar to try and pack a few more
fans in.
--------------------------------------------------------
End of the Season Business Management
--------------------------------------------------------
By now, you should be on the way to being a successful
franchise owner. Once the playoffs are over, or just about
over, there are a few things that you should know about and
take care of.
SHARED REVENUE TAX
The biggest expense in the game is the cost of the shared
revenue tax. Here is how it works. Every team will have a
percentage of it's profits taxed by the league. All of the
taxes will then go into a giant pool where the league
divides that money equally among every team by giving
everyone an equal rebate. Teams that were very unprofitable
will get a net gain from the shared revenue tax because the
rebate will be higher than than their tax. However, the
most profitable teams (i.e. yours) will be hit HARD by this
tax because the tax that you have to pay will be higher
than the rebate. This means that you will start out the
next season deep in the red since the money is paid on the
first day of next season. Keep in mind too that the money
will come out of your cash-on-hand. This means that you
should avoid spending a lot of money in the last month of
the regular season so that you will have plenty of cash-on-
hand to pay the tax. You may need quite a bit since the tax
may end up putting you tens of millions of dollars in the
red to start next season. This is where your primary
advertising and TV deals come into effect because the
income from the contract is paid to you at this time, and
this income can soften the blow from the tax.
It's usually quite shocking to see yourself so deep in the
red to start the season, but that's just because you are
looking at the balance sheet for the season. A balance
sheet is just a snapshot of your cumulative profits for the
year. Well, on the first day of the season, you have not
earned any profits for the year. It does not matter how
much your balance sheet shows at the end of the year
because once the calendar flips to 2006, 2007 and so on,
your balance sheet will be reset to zero. The size of your
ending balance sheet will not soften the blow from the tax.
Don't worry. Just keep at it and your profits per home game
will put you in the black some time before the all star
break. By the end of the season, you should be even MORE
profitable than you were last season. Also, the hit that
you take from future shared revenue taxes will be lessened
just by the fact that other teams are becoming more
profitable as well. This means that the total amount of tax
revenue that the league collects will keep growing, and
thus the rebate that you get will rise as well.
RESIGNING PLAYERS
This section is absolutely distinct from the RESTRUCTURING
PLAYER SALARIES section. The reason is because once the off
season begins, you have the opportunity to resign players
without releasing them first. You can just offer a player a
new contract and he will either accept or reject. This is
great because unlike the release-resign method that shrinks
your available payroll, tendering new offers to your
players here can INCREASE your available payroll. This is
because you are not releasing your players, and therefore,
you will not be obligated to pay the player's remaining
salary on top of his new salary. Previously, I recommended
that you use the release-resign method only for your best
players who are at the end of their contracts. Now, I
recommend that you resign all of the players that you want.
All of my best players were signed to long term contracts
and I did not have to worry about them anymore. At the same
time, my available payroll was increasing because players
were accepting lower salaries in the immediate future in
exchange for higher salaries in the future. By that point,
a franchise will be so profitable that those higher
salaries can be easily absorbed. Also, the increase in
available payroll allowed me to make some key trades that
solidified my team as truly elite.
**********************
****Glitch Warning****
**********************
Two very odd glitches happen in the off season that I
cannot figure out how to fix. They are minor, but you
should be warned about them.
The first glitch is one that makes any type of trade
impossible. When you attempt to trade players, the other
team's interest will be set at zero, no matter what trade
you offer. This is a glitch because almost all trade offers
will garner some interest, even if it is low. If any trade
that you offer garners no interest, then there is a glitch.
Exit without saving, and start the off season again. Then,
try to make the same trade offer(s) again. If there is some
interest, then you have overcome that particular glitch.
The second glitch involves player contracts for other
teams. In the game, you can work player options, club
options, or mutual options into player contracts. In my
personal example, at the end of the 2005 season, I wanted
to get two more starting pitchers. I had my eye on
Dontrelle Willis of FLA and Ben Sheets of MIL. Both players
were at the end of their contracts, and they were in
negotiations with their respective teams, so I had to wait
until their negotiations were over. After the amateur
draft, Willis was resigned to a two year deal and I was
able to trade for him. Sheets, however, was not signed and
remained unsigned. In fact, Sheets remained unsigned even a
week into the season but was nonetheless still playing.
This is significant because you are not allowed to trade
for a player that is not officially signed to a contract.
This happened with several players who were unsigned, and
yet they were not free agents. Therefore, I decided to pass
on trading for Sheets and I went for Roy Halladay from TOR,
who is very similar to Sheets in terms of stats. I do not
know why this happens, but just keep in mind that this may
happen.
TRADING PLAYERS
Here is a great opportunity for you to get the player that
you really want in order to round out your team. I decided
to list this section after the RESIGNING PLAYERS section so
that you can loosen up your payroll restriction and, thus,
give you more room to get the players that you want. The
only thing that I have to say about trades is that you can
make trade rather easily. In my franchise, I was able to
trade a minor league SS for Nomar Garciapara, Randy Winn
for Dontrelle Willis, a minor league catcher for Joe Mauer,
and two minor league pitchers for Roy Halladay. At the
first chance you get, resign them to long term deals and
congratulate yourself.
SETTING NEW ROSTERS
This is not really a business aspect of the game, but I
would like to address it. Since you have been making
trades, signing free agents and such, you will have to put
together three legitimate rosters, and each roster must
have 25 players. If you do not have the correct amount of
position players and pitchers, the game will not allow you
to proceed. To deal with this situation you should
determine how many players you will need at each position.
Let me give you my suggestion for what players to have:
POSITION # # for entire organization
C 2 6
1B 2 6
2B 2 6
3B 2 6
SS 2 6
OF 4 12
SP 5 15
RP 5 15
CP 1 3
TOTAL 25 75
This will ensure that your MLB, AAA, and AA clubs will all
have valid line-ups, starting rotations, relief squads and
the proper number of pitchers and position players. Keep in
mind that you will have to set the line-ups manually. Also,
if you have too many players at a single position(and by
implication, you will not have enough players at another
position), then release a few of them and then then sign
some cheap young players to fill out your minor league
rosters. I think that this is very important for your MLB
team because you probably noticed how your players energy
falls if they play a lot. It's just a good idea to have
back up players at every position in order to give your
guys a break once in a while. You will also notice that(If
your team is an American League team), that DH's tend to
keep their day-to-day energy levels high. One little trick
that I like to do is to have my two first basemen split
time between DH and 1B. For the Mariners, I play Sexon at
1B and Bucky Jacobsen at DH when I hit against right handed
pitchers. Against left handed starters, Sexon gets to play
at DH and Jabobsen plays at 1B, since Jacobsen is a first
baseman to begin with. This keeps them quite fresh relative
to the other players.
AMATEUR DRAFT
The only reason why I added this section is because you may
have a franchise goal that orders you to draft an All-Star
potential player. Well, here is the time to do it. Some
people may make the mistake of thinking that choosing the
player with the highest overall skill rating is the way to
get such a player. WRONG! If you want to nab an All Star
potential player you have to look at the player's potential
rating. The way that you do this is to move the cursor over
any individual player and check out the player's stats. You
will not be able to see a scouting report on the player,
but you will be able to see several ratings. Players are
given a letter grade for many of their skills like power,
contact, speed, and other such things. Each skill is given
a letter grade from A to F, with A being the best and F
being the worst. There is a category for all players called
"potential". An All-Star potential player will have a
potential A or B. An A will almost certainly yield such a
player, an a B will give you a very high chance of getting
such a player.
LOOSE ENDS
There are some things that you may want to take care of.
For instance, the end of your second season would be a good
time to pay off the balance of that big loan that you took
out at the very start of your first season. By this time,
you should have a hefty amount of cash-on-hand to
comfortably absorb the shared revenue tax, pay off your
loan and plenty of money left over. The main reason why you
should do this at the end of the second season is because
this is one way to soften the blow from the shared revenue
tax. Paying off the loan softens the blow because you will
not be making loan payments during the off-season.
Also, things like training facilities, rehab facilities,
and the quality of the field deteriorate over time. I like
to spend a few bucks to refurbish these things both now and
on the first day of the season. Doing so at both points is
a relatively low cost improvement, and it keeps everyone
happy. This is just my preference, but it is up to you.
--------------------------------------------------------
Conclusions and Final Words
--------------------------------------------------------
After days and many hours of testing, testing, and more
testing, I hope that this FAQ is worthy. I am still trying
to find out some of the dynamics of certain aspects of the
game as well as trying to note the significant differences
between MLB 2006 and 2005. A lot of the conclusions that I
reached were based on my knowledge and memory of MLB 2005,
so I spent a lot of time testing to see if past rules still
held up. This is by no means the final version of this FAQ,
and I hope to keep it up to date as I (and all of you)
begin to notice certain dynamics that were missed in order
to put forward the best information possible.
Just one last thing about putting these techniques into
action. Don't expect to be swimming in a pool of money
right off the bat. These are all techniques that will help
you increase your cash flow over time. If you make sound
preseason management decisions, then your absolute per game
cost should be relatively constant over the course of time,
even for several years. I started out earning approximately
$800,000 for my first home game(this figure will certainly
be different for you), but I was earning approximately
$1,350,000 by the end of April. At that point, I had done
only one price test by that point. At the end of my first
full franchise season, I was earning approximately
$2,800,000 per home game and I finished that season with
$94,000,000 in cash-on-hand.
The goal of this FAQ was to give you the tools to help you
keep your revenue rising above your relatively constant
costs, so you will notice great profits in time. At first
your revenue will be low. Just be diligent and patient.
Profits will come.
--------------------------------------------------------
Reader's Q&A
--------------------------------------------------------
If you have a particular question or problem with my profit
making strategies, then e-mail me and I may post your
question here along with the answer.
Q: How do you know which sections are selling out and when
they are. I wasn't able to find anything about daily
attendance levels...
A: To find attendance data, go to Business Management
-> Facilities -> Stadium Updates -> and then use R1 to
toggle to the Seating information. The data on that screen
has stats that show Season Section Attendance.
Q: Can I change teams during franchise mode?
A: No. Once you choose a team, you are stuck with that
team. This game is not like the NCAA Football games where
great success allows you to consider offers from other
teams. You are in it for the long haul.
--------------------------------------------------------
Credits and Thanks
--------------------------------------------------------
If you have given me a tip or helpful suggestion that makes
this FAQ better, then I will give you your credit here:
-first and foremost to 989 studios for making a great game
as well as to gamefaqs.com for posting this FAQ.
-theaub for reminding me to include the dangers of too many
promotional giveaways as well as reminding me to stress
diversity and variety in promotions and advertising.
--------------------------------------------------------
Contact Information
-------------------------------------------------------
If there is an aspect of profit building that I have
ignored, or if you have a question, suggestion, correction,
a tip, or an alternative strategy, then e-mail me at:
[email protected]
--------------------------------------------------------
Legal Stuff
--------------------------------------------------------
This may be not be reproduced under any circumstances
except for personal, private use. It may not be placed on
any web site or otherwise distributed publicly without
advance written permission. Use of this guide on any other
web site or as a part of any public display is strictly
prohibited, and a violation of copyright.
Copyright 2005 Mr. Kim Dalton Rodieck.
