poor markets everywhere

[steven0560]

I am in "The Banana League" and it seems all but 2 teams have lost money this season. Everyone seems to be trying to dump higher price stars for up and coming players with several years on their contracts for a low amount of points. Granted some of this is due to horrible managment, but a large number of teams are not drawing nearly as they should. Particularly the middle market teams. There has to be a problem here. I have the cubs and it is a painstaking chore to function day to day. Some of the bigger markets are over spending, but the middle and lower market teams just stuggle so much. Either salaries are too high or the markets are not high enough, There are teams that in real life draw big numbers to the park that are barely getting over 20,000 if they are lucky.

[takaplan]

First of all, the Cubs have a revenue bug in older leagues that makes them function like a tier 4.

How much cash does each team have? If they all have a lot of cash, the revenue of the league will fall substantially. It is best to have a cash average of about 75.

Also, does each team have a lot of expenses, or do they not have their revenue maximized? A team could be missing on on dozens of points of revenue by having their ticket prices set too high.

Tom

[groundhog]

A lot of the teams showing a loss now, will be in profit by the end of the season. Once the league has played a few seasons and team development is at different stages my guess is that we will get a more balanced trade picture.

[kohut]

They need to fix the attendance problem and get more teams selling out stadiums instead of getting 15,000.

[takaplan]

I don't know of what attendence problem you speak of...

Avg. Attendence in...

EML: 28,608
MLB in 2000: 30,099

Not too far off...only teams that are not drawing in EML are the teams that basically sold all their players for cash...like Minnesota drawing 12,000 while winning only 40-60 games.

But, even mid markets like Houston (me) are selling out nearly every game...average of 35,000 but I have sold out alot.

Tom

[Cipster]

Maybe it's because evrybody was hoarding cash. If most teams have cash reserves then the attendance will drop and conversly if everyone is poor the attendance will be inflated.
The "optimum" cash amount for teams seems to be between 50 and 150. In the Mogul Enthusiasts revenue was up by a lot because some teams had negative cash during the offseason.

[onethumb]

Average attendance is kind of deceptive here---if you multpily the difference between EML and real baseball by the number of games played and the number of stadiums played in, it comes out to over 3.5 million tickets difference, or about 70 million in revenue over the entire league (assuming 20 bucks for a ticket--might be less than that but this is not counting parking, concession, ect--the real loss may be even more than $20 a head). That's about 2.3 million per team, or as much as 5-10% of a small market team's budget.
I'd say it's something of a problem....especially in a league where no one has excessive cash (so we know the game is not adjusting revenue down to compensate).

[willat]

Well, money seems to be very tight in The Banana League. It might be because this is still the first season, but we have teams that are very much in the race dumping star players in May because of salary concerns.

One team had a payroll of 86 and is still projected to lose money. That leads me to believe that cutting salary alone will not be the answer to revenue problems. I hope that the game considers star players an attraction and shows that effect on ticket sales and TV money. There are many teams in baseball that sign free agents because they will increase attendance, even if the team still isn't a World Series contender.

If a team has no stars, like an 86 payroll team, then their attendance should suck and they should lose money. Who would go see a team like that?

[onethumb]

star players do affect attendance---even old star players....it's a ploy I use running my small market teams---if there's a potential hall-of-fame player out there at age 41 or 42 and still available at the end of free agency, I'll sign him for a point or 2 and sit him on the bench for pinch hitting duty. It usually increaces attendance enough for 3 or 4 point gain. Especially when I have a florida team...they want to play their last years close to where they'll retire LOL