How do you think the money will be affected if I had no arbitration or
if I fix the media contract so all teams make the same amount? I would
move the $25m to national contract as not to remove that cash. I plan
on running some test but wanted your input. Also do you think this would
work for a smaller league (12 teams)?

I need to re read your section explaining the points. Not quite seeing what you mean.

Can't really contribute here except to say that this is such a beautifully simple approach. Wish I would have thought of it.

I honestly don't know. I don't see why not having arbitration would be any different. You still have the same amount of money available between the teams to pay the players.

I don't want the teams getting the same media contract, but I would just see how it affected the financial projections during league creation. I feel that is the most important thing, is making sure you have all the payroll funds allocated to where the other essentialls can be added by the CPU as intended during programming.

I have no doubt it would work for a smaller league. Again, it is all about getting the dollar amount per market point to where you've got the funds you want in the right places.

These are again, just educated hunchs... but none of these change the payroll numbers themselves, so you should be fine. Your bigger markets are still going to get more payroll money, and if everyone gets the same media contract, they will still maintain the difference you set up in the budgets.

Me too. But I'm glad someone else did.

This is awesome! I can't wait to try it out.

Could you post your average attendance and ticket price? I would have to believe that these have an effect on the financial projections.

33,249 fans -- $23.65, visiting team gate share is 20%.

I'm sure it would work for smaller financials, since you are still just using the average presented by the projections itself based off the figures you use. I just haven't tested it with other settings.

I'm starting to run some experiments and figured I would begin sharing the results on this thread since I'm using this market-size method to determine my financials.

The major difference here is that I will be applying the market size and cash adjustments after having simmed for 25 years, nuking the history, and sending all players to the FA pool. My biggest question at the outset is what numbers I have to change and which will automatically adjust.

For example, Atlanta had been assigned a market size of 2 out of 20 by the game. I am changing it, somewhat arbitrarily, to 16 out of 20. I've determined the payroll-$ per point of market size and the corresponding draft budget (see below)
http://i1256.photobucket.com/albums/...Financials.png

So, first question is where is the best place to put that $94M so that it's available for the fantasy draft? My best guess is in the Budget line. But do I need to include revenue from media, tickets and merchandise in that number as well? This leads to my second question:
http://i1256.photobucket.com/albums/...nceOptions.png
Do I have to update all of the above fields as well? Cash? Media Revenue? If Media Revenue needs to be manually updated, is the same per-point system adequate?

I'm hoping to answer these for myself through trial and error, but if anyone has any thoughts, please share.

Why not just use this on a current MLB or MAL setup?

The short answer is that I only play fictional universes and I want to find a solution that works in my universe.

OK... I think you're missing the big point of what I was doing. You *JUST* use the draft budget on the inaugural draft screen.

I do ZERO edits to market size and the like. They auto-aligned by just using the team draft budgets.

MAL's players are all fictional.

I tried the settings with an 8 team league and this is what I got. Trying to
figure out why avg profit is -34million. I'm still in the create custom league page.

I started a new league with the settings and no issues this time around. I've simmed 10 seasons so far and the financials look great to me. Market size hasn't gotten out of whack like they usually do when I use default.

Yeah, there had to be an issue with your budges he first time around. Glad it is working out for you. :)

bump

I have a question. When using this approach, should I sim my fictional league out 20 years or can I start playing from year one? Thanks

Excellent post, sir. This information is incredibly useful for future projects.

Just a bump. This remains a marvelous idea.

In the example in the first post of the thread, the numbers don't match up exactly. Were there some typos in either the numbers for market size or payroll?

Most of the time, a market size point was worth $11 million in before inaugural draft budget. Meaning Yankees and Dodgers have a 12 market size and $132 million budget.

But Washington shows as a 10 market size with only a $99 million budget. Detroit and Boston have a 9 market size but a $110 million budget. Cleveland is a 4 but with a $55 million budget. San Diego is a 6 but only has a $55 million budget.

Were those just typos of either the budget or the market size? Or was something else like fan interest or maybe a charitable/miserly owner driving the budget too?

The attachment should show them in chart form in case what I said didn't make sense.