cities.txt

[GM24]

I created a cities.txt that more accurately mirrors current revenue for MLB teams. It also makes signing those very high priced players more feasible, becuase most teams recieved a needed boost in revenue.

The revenue generated by each team in the simulation is roughly 3/4 of the teams real life revenue, according to Forbes. These values inflate to near full value after 5 years of simulation.

Average attendance for the league can be around 40000 with this file becuase computer teams keep their prices fairly low, but at least the revenue is more accurate. I think I could fix it by lowering city and regional pop and increasing per capita income. But for now Im satisfied with this.

Boston and Philadelphia are the only two teams that go into debt consistently in the 1st year. About 20 of 30 teams lose money but most of this hit comes in the early part of the year when teams are adjusting ticket prices and what not.

Important stuff:
To use this file, first save it in your Baseball 200X folder. Then open an old or begin a new franchise with Baseball Mogul, and go to Advanced Tools ... under the Tools menu. Select Import Cities, confirm, and walla.

--Updated for V7.02--

[goyanks225]

I got a message that said it couldn't import it. If and when I get it to work, will I have to do this for each game or will the import be applied for every new franchise automatically?

[GM24]

Weird... I havent had any problems. Make sure its in the Baseball 2005 directory, in the same place as the bbm2005.exe.

Yes you have to import it everytime you start a game. Let me know what you think about it.

[goyanks225]

It looks great, and for the most part realistic. However, the Yankees losing money? I can't say I agree with this, because if they lost money, how could they have the money to sign all these players? Sports Illustrated, I'd say 2 months ago, had a feature about the Yankees and Red Sox and it said that the Yanks annual revenue was about $333 million last year, and Boston's was $233 million. I don't know if there's any way you could change that, but if there is that would be great.

[GM24]

The patch changes revenue stuff so I have to go back and fix stuff... this time Ill try to keep attendance under control. I wouldnt use this with v7.01.

[GM24]

I updated cities.txt for V7.02 so that teams will have more realistic (higher) revenues.

[DrDoom]

I have a link to a site that has actual per capita income for all cities in the united states.

http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/reis/

Average per capita income is around $31,000 and tops out around $46,000(san francisco and oakland). Also, if your trying to lower the average attendance, try playing around with the fanbase rather than lowering the city populations. Most of the city populations in baseball mogul are already much lower than what they are in real life. ;)

[DrDoom]

Also, if your interested in using actual city populations here is a link to a site with population statistics of every metropolitan area in the world.

http://www.citypopulation.de/

[GM24]

Thanks Dr. Doom, I am already aware of those sites. But the point of cities.txt isnt for accurate city regional and per capita income. Besides income would have to be adjusted to 1997 dollars.

The point of the cities.txt is for accurate revenues.

As far as attendance is concerned, I dont think I can control it. If Boston only wants to charge 20 bucks a ticket to get sellouts, then they will. But i will look into raising income and lowering regional population/fan base.

Most of the increased attendance is caused by the implied revenue sharing (2003 rules).

So everyone knows, when I did the cities.txt for 7.00, I started out plugging in data from citypopulation.de and houseandhome.msn.com, but then everything had to be tweaked to give teams annual revenue I desired.

In 7.02 I just did the tweaking so that the revenues in 2004 would be the teams 2003 revenues according to forbes.com, divided by 1.29. This would allow the total revenue league wide would be about 3 billion dollars in the first year of simulation.

This inflates becuase I cannot predetermine the inital fan loyalty rating, which rises in most cases becuase the ratings are set conservatively.

So if Scorey and friends are so inclined to adjust inital fan loyalty ratings (in their player database), and I may be able to help, then I will make an updated cities.txt and try to keep attendance in check.

[SouthernYankee]

This website is for US cities only and has city population based on the most recent census.

It also shows median household income along with other interesting data.

http://www.city-data.com/

[zhongv1979]

As far as I know, the population of cities in baseball mogul does not have an effect. The most important parameter is the metropolitan population.

[WhoIsTheBestCop]

The most influential city stat that affects how much money a team can generate during optimal conditions would be Per Capita Income.

Good fan loyality & fan pase plus high Per Capita Income will make fans pay more for tickets and pay more for consessions.

It looks like almost all of the teams have the wrong Per Capita Income which causes them not to make enough revenue. This is what seperates a big market team from the smaller ones. Even in the 2k5 default cities it is severely inaccurate.

A good test would be to make the cities.txt file exactly like the 2002 census and simulate 10 years and see what happens. It doesn't .

Fan base and fan loyality affect how many people have interest in showing up to the game so if you are poor in both of those stats you will not have high attendance but those sorry few who are willing to go to the game will still spend a good dollar.

I mean you do not see real MLB teams slashing their ticket and concession prices all the time do you? But if the their team stinks and no one is going to the games they will trade that $15mil Star.

[SeferKoheleth]

Be careful about considering the per-capita income of JUST the city, and not the metro area. For example, the City of Philadelphia is poor-- with a PCI of about $26K. But the surrounding counties, such as Montgomery, Deleware and Bucks have PCIs of $47.4K, $38.5k, and $39.7k respectively -- creating a quite wealthy metro area.

[GM24]

Holy ****. Let me requote myself.



the point of cities.txt isnt for accurate city regional and per capita income.


The point of the cities.txt is for accurate revenues

Maybe I wasnt clear last time.

I dont want accurate data, becuase accurate data *ucks everything up. Trust me, I tried.

Any inflation isnt my fault. I cant control fan loyalty.

I can read a help file, just like you.

And I wasnt born yesturday, just so you know. I was born about 7000 yesterdays ago. So dont talk to me like I was. If you think my project sucks, tell me. Please be frank. And then ill tell you why it doesnt.

Dont ask me how to spell Yesterday.

You cant say cr_ap on the forums.

This is my 100th post. It took me 3 years.

I refuse to make Boston any richer. Ditto for Phili.

I've playtested this 30 years into the future. Sometimes the Expos actually finish over .500.

I've already acknowleged the fact that higher income and lower fan base is going to help curb attendance. For the moment it only hurts Boston and Chicago becuase they sell out every game. Like they do anyway.

I'm not updating this until after a good roster update. For now the cities.txt work great. So buy the game if you havent (which I suspect from some of you) and download cities.txt!

[ryan2288]

Originally posted by goyanks225
I got a message that said it couldn't import it. If and when I get it to work, will I have to do this for each game or will the import be applied for every new franchise automatically?


I got this and you have to save it as "cities.txt" when i first got it, it said to save it as "cities[1].txt".

[boomboom]

Originally posted by ryan2288
I got this and you have to save it as "cities.txt" when i first got it, it said to save it as "cities[1].txt".

Yes that is so that you can still keep your old file....just rename your old one citiesold.txt, and your new one cites.txt

Congrads on your 100th post!

and this file is GREAT, thanks for your hard work!

[oriole^]

As some of you might remember, I too have a cities.txt file which I have kept. It differs from crispy's, though: my idea was to provide accurate populations and per capita incomes, and to add many, many more options for where to place your team. So many, in fact, that I inadvertantly discovered a bug - you can't have a cities.txt file of more than 98 entries. So my file has a separate ReadMe.txt with the remaining cities.

I haven't touched this file in about a year, and it's made for 2k4, but I'll be happy to include it for folks to look at and play with.

[GM24]

Good work, Oriole. I was unaware of this file's existence. I can respect how much time you put into this, seeing that I only dealt with 28 cities.

I did a test run with the file in Baseball Mogul 2005 and the revenues turned out pretty well. Very well actually.



AMERICAN LEAGUE (2004) Tickets Revenue Payroll Profit Cash
Anaheim Angels 22,466 $78.2M $75.1M -$6.8M $3.5M
Baltimore Orioles 27,720 $87.2M $56.8M $12.3M $23.3M
Boston Red Sox 33,214 $130.7M $132.6M -$15.1M $811K
Chicago White Sox 28,034 $104.2M $60.6M $17.7M $31.0M
Cleveland Indians 26,813 $65.4M $30.5M $13.2M $23.4M
Detroit Tigers 26,661 $76.5M $46.2M $11.5M $21.9M
Kansas City Royals 29,522 $60.6M $61.3M -$6.1M $1.1M
Minnesota Twins 28,123 $68.9M $49.8M $6.6M $13.7M
New York Yankees 38,403 $148.3M $134.2M -$7.1M $15.1M
Oakland Athletics 17,274 $59.2M $64.1M -$8.7M -$169K
Seattle Mariners 26,955 $78.4M $79.4M -$8.4M $2.4M
Tampa Bay Devil Rays 20,670 $48.0M $40.3M -$939K $5.7M
Texas Rangers 35,760 $90.0M $40.3M $23.8M $34.0M
Toronto Blue Jays 29,470 $82.2M $72.5M -$665K $7.8M

NATIONAL LEAGUE (2004) Tickets Revenue Payroll Profit Cash
Arizona Diamondbacks 33,823 $74.9M $41.3M $10.8M $20.9M
Atlanta Braves 42,446 $109.4M $73.4M $13.6M $25.7M
Chicago Cubs 33,777 $123.1M $69.4M $22.0M $37.9M
Cincinnati Reds 20,604 $43.9M $33.7M $864K $8.9M
Colorado Rockies 33,172 $88.9M $67.4M $4.8M $16.1M
Florida Marlins 18,598 $49.4M $58.6M -$11.8M -$3.5M
Houston Astros 39,130 $86.1M $77.8M $342K $8.6M
Los Angeles Dodgers 33,765 $108.7M $77.9M $1.1M $21.6M
Milwaukee Brewers 20,543 $45.2M $31.8M $2.5M $10.7M
Montreal Expos 16,348 $39.6M $50.2M -$11.9M -$6.9M
New York Mets 21,890 $99.0M $61.4M $9.7M $27.4M
Philadelphia Phillies 39,322 $104.7M $91.8M $1.9M $11.8M
Pittsburgh Pirates 25,583 $57.0M $31.7M $10.5M $17.5M
San Diego Padres 38,143 $70.2M $61.1M -$1.4M $7.6M
San Francisco Giants 28,035 $97.1M $88.5M -$4.0M $7.7M
St. Louis Cardinals 36,418 $94.5M $86.1M -$5.2M $6.9M





AMERICAN LEAGUE (2010) Tickets Revenue Payroll Profit Cash
Anaheim Angels 22,265 $106.8M $74.3M -$2.4M $68.5M
Baltimore Orioles 36,585 $132.6M $147.1M -$14.7M -$13.0M
Boston Red Sox 33,871 $173.5M $163.1M -$8.5M $9.8M
Chicago White Sox 32,027 $154.7M $98.7M $39.8M $36.5M
Cleveland Indians 29,945 $94.9M $102.1M -$7.7M -$4.3M
Detroit Tigers 38,430 $147.0M $150.7M -$6.4M $1.7M
Kansas City Royals 30,274 $87.9M $89.2M -$2.2M -$1.6M
Minnesota Twins 25,194 $81.7M $70.6M $8.2M $4.9M
New York Yankees 38,294 $193.4M $181.1M $2.7M $10.5M
Oakland Athletics 15,850 $71.5M $73.8M -$4.2M -$6.9M
Seattle Mariners 23,792 $87.3M $88.2M $2.4M -$3.9M
Tampa Bay Devil Rays 16,238 $57.3M $70.7M -$12.9M -$12.3M
Texas Rangers 41,714 $174.6M $167.9M -$5.1M $14.8M
Toronto Blue Jays 24,996 $109.2M $111.8M -$1.8M -$2.9M

NATIONAL LEAGUE (2010) Tickets Revenue Payroll Profit Cash
Arizona Diamondbacks 43,747 $111.9M $109.6M -$10.1M $1.3M
Atlanta Braves 43,105 $135.5M $102.0M $25.9M $25.7M
Chicago Cubs 37,719 $189.0M $182.0M -$2.2M $8.3M
Cincinnati Reds 20,644 $62.6M $61.9M -$7.3M $4.5M
Colorado Rockies 44,659 $150.8M $146.7M $0 $2.1M
Florida Marlins 17,946 $54.2M $40.2M $13.1M $6.3M
Houston Astros 28,908 $97.4M $92.4M $3.0M $2.7M
Los Angeles Dodgers 45,227 $155.5M $137.8M $6.1M $14.1M
Milwaukee Brewers 16,515 $56.3M $54.9M $1.8M -$2.8M
Montreal Expos 14,103 $50.2M $62.8M -$11.6M -$11.0M
New York Mets 27,016 $161.8M $153.6M -$3.7M $5.7M
Philadelphia Phillies 39,154 $169.7M $145.4M $18.8M $13.1M
Pittsburgh Pirates 22,365 $71.9M $77.9M -$5.0M -$4.8M
San Diego Padres 22,013 $68.8M $35.8M $24.8M $18.8M
San Francisco Giants 37,357 $164.1M $161.5M -$5.2M $3.9M
St. Louis Cardinals 37,536 $136.4M $150.2M -$17.2M -$9.8M



Some eye-popping figures there but nothing too bothersome.

I think that the rising revenue league wide is due too the rising league wide expenses. Which is a good thing (not so much the inflation of expenses, which is due to the powerful Shortstop and Centerfielder Unions.) :rolleyes:

I think we should be able to have accurate revenues and accurate city data, but it would take some tweaking of the program itself.

I would like to see revenue sharing added in a future version of Baseball Mogul. The game makes sure there is enough money league-wide and does a good job of it, but the disparity of revenue of revenue between teams has become too much. Back in BBM '99, the Yankees would make 2x as much as the Expos. Now they make more than 4X that.

Becuase teams dont lie about their revenue in BBM it would be easy, teams get taxed say 25% of how much they make in a day, and it would get pooled back out evenly. Simple concept, dont know how tough it would be to implement.

[oriole^]

Thanks, crispy. The trickiest thing is if you move teams. The whole algorithm for proximity to other cities is way out of whack. Mogul literally divides the metropolitan area in half and figures that only one half of the city will go to one team's game, the other goes to the other half...so attendance just plummets way too much. My new suggestion is if you move a team into another's city, raise the Fan Loyalty level by at least two grades. Conversely, move a team out (such as Oakland from the Bay Area), the team left behind should be downgraded two or three grades.

Very much agreed on revenue sharing. And salary caps, too!

[SeferKoheleth]

I installed the file, but Philly still loses $40 million the first year. Is that b/c I'm playing on mogul difficulty?

[GM24]

Are you playing as the Philles?

If you arent, this happens sometimes... Philly's computer GM will set their ticket prices way too high and only make 60 something million. But then the next year they fix it. It only happens sometimes, and I dont much understand it. You can lower their ticket price without going into commish mode, and they wont raise it back up.

I will do something to fix this once Scorey rosters come out. For now you have to lower their tickets down from $29.00 manually.

If you are playing as the Phils, I never seem to be able to make as much money on Mogul than the computer can. I would tweak your ticket prices until the projected revenue is optimal, and then lower it a little more if you want to attract more fans. I would also compare your concession prices to the prices of similar cities, and that should give you a good idea of an optimal setting.

[RotoChamp2]

Crispy, you mind if we give this cities file a go in our universe? I've been playing around with city files for a while and haven't had any luck getting accurate numbers. Of course, some of that could be due to the fact that the PC run teams will set obscene ticket prices.

[GM24]

I understand your plight Roto. Go ahead and give it a shot.

As far as the high ticket price issue, I honestly dont see it after the first year.

A few things... the target revenue is actually the teams 2003 revenue (according to Forbes) multipled by .7735. This allows for the league wide revenue to be 3 billion dollars. But you can make the target whatever you want it to be.

If you sim a season and a teams 'target revenue' is off by more than 6-7 million, I would make a note of it and adjust some stuff. Just dont advance a season becuase the per capita income will fluctuate.

I would give Boston and Philidephia more cash so that they dont go bankrupt in the 1st year.

After you get the 1st year right I would sim out a few years into the future so that things dont get nutty. This will also give you a good idea of what level the salary demands should be.

Dont worry about attendance levels. Its a side effect of the implied revenue sharing.

I cant really give you any more advice than that... its kind of a guess and check thing. I dont know the exact effects of regional pop and PCI. Although I can guess that one means more people and the other means more money. City pop means nothing.

Good luck, Roto. I cant wait to see the player database.

[GM24]

Almost forgot.. I have the Forbes figures for you, which I havent touched.

[RotoChamp2]

Question though. With Philly playing in a new stadium this year, can't we at least assume their revenue will increase? Especially in light of them (currently) leading their division?

[GM24]

They still play in Veterans Stadium in the game. If you make a new stadium for them, then it will increase. And in the game, the better your place in the standings, the more people will come to your game.

You can assume whatever you want. I'll allow you creative license.

[RotoChamp2]

Ah, I didn't realize that they were still in Vet. Stadium in the game. I will make a note of checking the stadiums to be sure that everyone's in their current stadium.

Thanks much!

[GM24]

Yes, and San Diego still plays in Qualcomm Stadium in the game.. now they are in Petco Park, and (according to the website) claim to have the best sight lines in baseball. Exciting stuff.