That’s because the league uses Gate Sharing as one of its primary tools for controlling the environment, and I’ve created this little spreadsheet to breakdown how I think this sharing is affecting the league’s finances overall. This is a bit of a peeve of mine as, while OOTP finances shows how final revenue sharing would work (which is a tool we don’t use, and one I would not recommend we use), the game doesn’t actually let you see the guts of what’s happening around Gate Sharing.
TLDR:
The TLDR version is that you don’t have to actually know anything here other than the fact that I think the OOTP “Gate Revenue” is the final answer after that gate sharing is calculated.
For some stupid folks like me, however, that’s not quite enough.
I want to known how the finances of the game are working and who is paying for what. I want to know why gate sharing is the best choice for our world, and how it’s helping. I want to know why teams like Seattle, Yellow Springs, Calgary, and California are…um…helpful. [grin]
THE DETAILS:
Digging into it, these four teams are acting like a big-ole money pump, pushing cash from their fan bases out into the coffers of much of the rest of the league.
The report details how Seattle, for example, is sending the league $15.3M in gate. Yellow Springs is next, cutting a virtual check for $11.8M. Calgary and California follow along at $8.8M and $7.7M respectively.
Here’s the data, sorted by average ticket price:
An example on the other end shows Hawaii wound up $7.95M richer. They created only $4.4M in gate revenue (folks in Hawaii apparently preferred the beach), so proffered only $1.98M of that for sharing. In return they received that $9.9M check from the league, adding up to that $7.95M.* I think the league documents said 35%, but I needed to make it 45% to match Randy's evidence of $15/ticket)
You can look through lots of other teams yourself—you might see, for example, that JLSB champion Mexico City was still a “taker” in the Sharing game (receiving $352K), whereas San Fernando’s Wild Card team donated $4M to the cause. Omaha failed to make the playoffs, but are a giver at the $452K level. Nashville gets $6.3M to add to the plan, whereas Des Moines gets only $1.7M.
OVERALL EFFECT: FRICK DRIVES CASH MACHINE
Across the board, $63M in funds were transferred from big revenue teams to those with smaller cash intake. Of that $63M, $43M (68%) came from the big four noted above.
One major affect of this dynamic is that when you add it up, is that it becomes obvious that the Frick League is where the money is. Teams in Frick pump some $30M from its coffers into those of Johnson League teams.
COMPETITIVE BALANCE MAINTAINED
That said, this “$30M pump” is certainly a transient effect. As outlined in the report’s footnotes, the league uses this financial dynamic along with a salary and cash cap to ensure the competitive environment is relatively flat. No team can stockpile financial resources to such a degree as they become a perpetual machine, and no team is so destitute that they can’t ever recover from dire moments. ”Gate receipts are used in defining the league’s future budgets, whereas other schemes do not, so gate sharing is a considerably greater evening of the playing field than other revenue sharing methods.”
Yellow Springs GM Ron Collins commented on the use of Gate Sharing and the disproportionate share that the Nine provide at a local community outreach. “We think it’s fantastic. We can’t play exciting baseball if we don’t have great teams to play against and the goal is a healthy league, so we’re happy to contribute more than our share right now. Someday we might need the extra boost—actually, we needed it on our way up—that’s how the world works best in a lot of arenas, not just baseball. If we do this right, everyone makes enough money, and nobody dies.”
HOW TO READ THE REPORT
OOTP provides us the “final” gate revenue (which I include in column I, and which is the revenue each team gets after gate sharing). It also gives us attendance (Column B) and Season Ticket Revenue (Column D). Unfortunately, it does not provide public data on the number of season tickets sold, but we can work around that a little.
To determine the actual gate for each team (Column E), we need to calculate the amount of revenue each team shares and retains for themselves (Columns G and F). We do this through an odd little process.
1) Calculate the team’s revenue sharing check received by summing up all gate receipts across the league, and multiplying by 45% (which I’m pretty sure is our sharing rate…though the constitution said 35% at one point). We do this in Column I, and get $9.9M—which we distribute in Column H.
2) Calculate the amount of each team’s actual gate retained (Column F) by subtracting their “sharing check” of $9.9M from their OOTP gate.
3) Determine how much revenue each team throws into the sharing pot (Column G) by the equation (Shared = Retained/(1-Sharing %)-Retained)
4) Calculate true team gate revenue (Column E) by adding retained and shared revenue.
The TOTAL TICKET REVENUE columns (J & K) show the overall effect of all ticket revenue (Including season tickets) before and after sharing. Seattle, for example, actually brought $80.27M in through their coffers, but after gate sharing that drops to $64.98M. That difference is the overall effect of Gate Sharing, and is shown in Column N.
I also use this information to calculate what I think are the actual Average Ticket Prices each team enacted throughout the season (season tickets, and price adjustments). In this case:
1) Average Ticket Price (Column L) is Total Ticket Revenue Before Sharing (Column J) divided by total attendance (Column B).
2) Estimated Ticket Price (Column M) is the estimation given by using (OOTP Gate + Season Tickets)/Attendance ([Column I + Column D]/Column B
