MLB:2006 by 989 Studios "Business Management" FAQ by Mr. Kim D. Rodieck also known in the gamefaqs.com world as "economiester" ------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------- Version History -------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------- Introduction ------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------- EXPLANATION OF COST STRUCTURES -------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------- Checking your Financial Health -------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------- Preseason Business Management -------------------------------------------------------- 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 --------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------- In-Season Business Management -------------------------------------------------------- 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. 
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:

kim@rodieck.com


--------------------------------------------------------
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.