As always, let me start by saying I have no inside knowledge here. The ways fan interest, market size, and whatnot interact is a cloud that is really kind of hard to talk about with any great surety. I’ve written about it in the past here, but after a bit of a discussion on the OOTP public boards I got interested in the topic again.
So, I thought I’d take a magnifying glass to one of the enigmas in our league: Edmonton.
I mean, what the hell, right? The Jackrabbits have been to the post season six straight times and won a pair of Landis trophies in that span. How can they be hanging around 60 in Fan Interest?
And, yet they are.
So I figured, let’s go back in time and look at a lot of information to see if we can see exactly why that might be. Let me start by noting I’m taking historical market size and fan loyalty data from StatsPlus, but the rest is from a data set I update every year. In doing this review, I’ve tabulated the team’s Budget, Payroll, Average Ticket Prices, Attendance, Market Size, Fan Loyalty, Revenue (split by ticket, merchandise, playoff, and media), Games Won, and Fan Interest. With a little luck we’ll be able to develop a year-over-year narrative to the team’s progress over the years and how that might explain Fan Interest.
First, though, to refresh, let’s remember that the Edmonton franchise came into the league as an expansion team back in 2029, so they’re a clean sheet of paper from that point on. As I recall, the Jackrabbits took a “draft for later” approach to the expansion draft, and it shows in that first year’s performance.
All right, then, let’s dive in.
Here is all the data I mentioned before tabulated across the history of the Edmonton Franchise: (click to expand)
Let’s walk through year by year, shall we?
2029
Adam D takes the team, drafts a bunch of guys, creates a massive pitcher’s park, then leaves for fresher streams elsewhere. With a budget of $90M (which is lowish), he drops in a $55M payroll (about half our salary cap). Buoyed by the early fan interest that drives expansion teams and their moderately low ticket prices ($7.85) the Jackrabbits draw 3.45M people to the stadium. The resulting team is not good, however, and by the end of the year it’s sitting at 65 wins and a poor fan interest of 66.
The “good news” is that at least the team made $87M in revenue, just barely enough to sustain that $90M budget for next year.
Let me note for a moment something that might get glossed over by the casual observer.
Market Size = Big, and Loyalty = Good.
To the uninitiated, that might sound pretty okay. “Big” and “Good” sound solid enough, after all. But in OOTP these are just labels for levels. You could call them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … or A, B, C D, E, of Defcon Red, Orange, and Yellow for that matter. The fact is that in the BBA, a “Big” Market size will generally put you at the bottom third of the pile, and a “Good” Fan Loyalty is basically low-middle. I think this is important because (though I have no great insider knowledge here) I think it’s almost got to be that the game manages the pool of resources to keep it in line with the league itself—hence certain operations almost have to happen in ways that effectively apportion cash to teams at some rate. This means, if I gain stature, everyone else, by definition, loses—and vice versa.
Think about that a minute and see if you come to the same conclusion as I do. Rank of Market Size might really make a difference.
Regardless, things look reasonable in Edmonton for 2030.
2030 & 31
By this point, Dee has been replaced with Rhys Allen. There are some good progressions on the field. Small steps at least. The team wins 67 games in 2030 and 70 games in 2031.
And, yet, their Fan Interest drops to 58 and then 50. Ouch.
Note, though, that for whatever reason, the team raised its ticket prices to $8.25 in 2030, and again to $8.40 in 2031. Now, I realize these are small increases, but think about it. The club sucked a year before, and it wasn’t that much better in either of those following years.
Let’s look at 2030 closely first. That increase of $.40 is a 5% increase. Attendance drops from 3.4M to 3.0—about a 10% reduction. That drop also results in a #2.1M loss in ticket revenue and another $1.5M loss in merchandise sales. Seems natural to me. The team’s losses are partially offset by a bump to their media contract, but it’s not enough—their $85.5M in total revenue drives the 2031 budget to $85M (a $5M reduction from 2030), and despite winning a couple more games, fan interest drops from 66 to that 58.
To make matters worse, as noted above, the team raises ticket prices again in 2031, this time only 2%. But remember, we are effectively a small market team living on a shoestring and a prayer. The team, again as noted, is only a tad better (70 wins).
The eventual financial results are not overly surprising then: Attendance is down another 350K people, ticket revenue is down $2.6M, merchandise is down $400K. With a total revenue of $82M, next year’s budget is set at $80M, and as fan interest dives to 50, the death spiral is in full effect.
Let’s stop to take a look here: The bottom line is that a very small market team with a fan base that is not yet established put a crappy product on the field, and then went about raising prices on their tickets. What do you think is going to happen here? Should the game reward that? Would a fanbase do so? You can say that the increases were small, but also remember that at $7.80, those original prices were on the low end. A $0.15 for a team at $15 is tiny. A $0.15 increase at that level is twice as large.
2032
The first big news here is that we get another GM change. Rhys Allen is done, in with Brandon Brooks. I note that in online leagues this is an issue on its own. For a team to come out of a funk requires a good GM a bit of time and a dedicated plan. I have no idea if Rhys could have gotten the job done or not, but he left the mess for Brandon. The good news is that the team dropped prices a touch ($0.13). They also added $4M to the payroll.
That bad news is that by now, with a 50 Fan Interest, that kind of small cut just did not make anything big happen.
The team won only 58 games. With the aforementioned bad fan Interest, attendance edged down a little (from 2.66M to 2.59M) and therefore ticket revenue was down another $900K, merchandizing another $100K. The team won only 58 games. Fan interest dropped another point.
2033
Probably trying to get some revenue going, Brandon (now in his second season) substantially raised ticket prices while fielding a team that lost more than any other Edmonton team had ever lost. They won only 54 games, losing 108. He also dropped payroll from $66M to $60M, so take that as you will. I mean, what would fans of a shitty team that cut payroll do when they also raised prices by a buck on an $8.25 price basis?
You may think you know where this is going, and you’re at least partially right.
Oddly, attendance did not drop—which makes me wonder if the club took in some of those popular veterans for a while. I should research that. Or maybe it was just some random luck—or they played some good teams on the road over the weekends and reaped some extra gate sharing (the BBA shared gate receipts at 35% in those days). All that said, attendance also did not really rise much—only a total of about 500 butts a game. As a result, the team reaped about $3.5M more in combined ticket and merchandizing revenue.
Regardless, despite the short term gains noted above, the fans did not respond well to that increase. Interest dropped another two points to the abyss of 47.
I should note that this is when the first inklings of another issue surrounding the team began to foment. Some established GMs thought the Jackrabbits were keeping prospects in the minors too long. I should say up front I was not one of those GMs, but that doesn’t really matter. I’m not sure what to make of that, really, because—to be direct—I did not think bringing the kids up would have won more games at that point. Folks can argue, however, that doing that deed, indeed, could have changed the team’s winning profile, hence bumped the revenue, hence stopped the bleeding.
So. Anyway.
Amid the flurry of conversation, 2033 did see the debut of one guy—sparkling prospect Bobby Lynch debuted on mound in Edmonton. He struggled that first year, burning a season of min-sal eligibility by starting 25 times on a team that won only 54 games.
In Retrospect: Since hindsight is 20/20, I think what had to happen in Edmonton this year was to: (1) keep Bobby Lynch as far away from a major league service day as possible. (2) Rather than raise ticket prices, cut them deeply…say down to $7 or $6.5, and (3) buy as many popular veterans that could be found on 1-season contracts as possible.
Maybe I’m wrong here. Maybe that’s too simplistic.
All I can say for sure is the infamous Trumpian line of “what do you have to lose?” The jackrabbits, as actually managed, reduced their revenue stream for the fifth straight season and enter 2033 with a Fan Interest of a debilitating 47. And, also, like watching the Trumpian handling of the coronavirus, things are going to get worse before it gets better.
2034 & 2035
Still struggling at an $80M budget, and stung by those price hikes, Brandon drops prices almost a buck a pop in 2034, and unlike what you’d expect, his attendance does not increase. Instead, it drops 220K people. It’s not helped by the fact that the team wins only 65 games—which, admittedly, is an increase from last year, but is still only 65 games. This is where the pressure to bring his kids up got the most intense. This is also the time period Brandon started having life issues and was drawn away from the team. So that didn’t help. He held on through both years, though.
The 2034 combination of price drops and attendance fade in a $4.5M reduction in revenue brought in from tickets and merchandise. By now, the team’s six-season record of futility has run it’s course and fan interest drops to 44.
A second price drop in 2035 takes tickets back to their lowest time since that expansion year, and the team suddenly draws nearly 3M people—which brings revenue back to 2033 levels. The team again wins 65 games, though, and Fan Interest drops to an All-Time low of 42.
A Couple Key Points:
(1) One of the most important things about this season (I believe) is that we now have seven and soon to be eight straight horrible seasons. It is somewhere between 2035 and 2036 that Edmonton has a horrible, terrible thing happen—Market Size Drops to “Above Average.” Again, “Above Average” sounds great, but in the BBA “Above Average” is bottom of the barrel, and if I’m right that OOTP’s revenue creation algorithms are apportioning a common cash flow, then this is what is known in the business as a Real Big Problem.
(2) The more I look at these things, the more I think that if you’re worried about Fan Interest, fiddling around with small price drops is kind of silly. A rule of thumb seems to be that if you raise prices a bunch, Fan Interest will drop, and if you drop them a bunch Fan Interest will grow. Otherwise, I don’t think a nudge one way or the other does a whole lot. Maybe a point or two. Dunno/
2036
Anyway, as noted in the discussion above, 2036 sees a level drop in Market Size, meaning Edmonton is now officially a Very Small Market when it comes to the BBA. That said, a couple of interesting things happen to the team this year, and you see them in the data here.
Where to start. Hmmm.
Well, how about we begin with a GM change. At this point, Brandon turns over the keys to a guy who stays less than a year and then is replaced by Chris Robillard. It turns out that this is a key point in the franchise’s history. Chris Robillard is, as we all know, A Very Good GM. He’s a guy who can assess talent, and who can take advantage of the game’s inner workings. He’s also got a franchise stocked with young talent built upon years of drafting in the top couple spots.
And let’s talk about this. Somewhere in this chain of GMs, the team gets serious about slashing ticket prices, and drops to $7.48, its lowest point ever. The team maintains its attendance at that rate, and though it loses $1.3M in revenue, it recovers two points of Fan Interest, back up to 44.
Among the problems with this revenue drop is that it corresponds to a media contract reduction, and the final result is that the 2036 performances provide only a $75M budget in 2037—a $5M reduction.
A Quick Summary Note: I want to stop here because until this point, the team has been a classic small market team struggling to build any tail wind. As such, we’ve been able to almost isolate out the influence of ticket price manipulation on the fan base, and we’ve been able to see the impact altered revenue streams have on BBA budgets. We’ve even seemnthe impact performance has on Market Size, or at least one case of it. From this point onward, with Robillard at the helm, we’re going to move into a new phase—a situation where this kind of team gets really, really successful.
2037
All right. The dominos are now aligned. Yes, Edmonton’s budget is low, but it almost doesn’t matter because all those great young players are on league minimum salaries.
The final result is that 2037 sees the club win 96 games, an astounding 32 game jump from the previous season and a result that sees the team in a playoff series for the first time in their history. You would think that fans would be flocking to the stadium. You would expect that interest would leap like a frog on a hot tin roof. But, no. Attendance drops like a rock (from 2.90M to 1.27M). Fan Interest barely budged from 44 to 47.
What the hell right? I mean, Shitfire, the game must be broken!
Alas, no.
It’s important to remember that this is the period where it became all the rage for teams to drive their ticket prices up. At least two GMs released manifestos imploring the league to raise prices, and on the whole, that happened. In this particular case, Edmonton used this period to raise their tickets from that $7.48 average to a WHOPPING $17.80. That is a 138% raise in ticket prices. You raise prices like that in real life on a fanbase that’s already disinclined to care, and you expect them to come flocking? I think not.
In Edmonton’s case, not counting the extra $8M in playoff revenue—which does not result in increased budgets—the huge price change improved revenue by a about $1M. Chicken feed relative to what would have happened had they kept prices the same (or maybe raised them a little over the span of the year)
In retrospect, it would be interesting to know exactly what would have happened if Chris had left his ticket prices at, say, $8.00 to start the year, then edged them up to whatever the market would bear over the course of the season. My guess is that attendance would have crested 3M easily, and the team would have bumped Fan Interest considerably more than the three-point increase they got. That’s my theory, anyway. Alas, we cannot go backward in time. All we know for sure is that the team put their ticket prices into orbit, and the fans responded by not supporting a winning team.
Honestly, though, that sounds like something real people would do.
Learning: Raising prices a shit ton appears to reduce the growth of Fan Interest
2038
This year sees the team tasting success and continuing to win games. The Jackrabbits win 93 and take the division crown for the second season in a row. When Robillard drops prices a bit (a $2.20 drop, or about 13%), he gets a solid attendance boost (which I’d guess includes, then, a spring Budget increase). The club draws over 3M people to the stadium, wins a Landis, and grows real revenue by a very nice $27M, thank you very much.
The team’s Fan Interest gets a big 13 point bounce to 60.
Now some might wonder why this didn’t peg to 100. The team won the Landis, for crying out loud! But remember. Years of futility. And remember “Above Average” market size and “Good” Fan loyalty are Very Small market size and pretty low Fan Loyalty relative to the rest of the league. When viewed in that light, a 13 point bounce is not insubstantial.
Let’s watch what happens next season.
2039
The Jackrabbits win “only” 83 games the following year. That’s good enough to finish second in a moderately tepid division, and they find their way into the post season anyway—where they get dumped in the first round.
Buoyed by last season’s success, Chris (justifiably, but probably wrongly) increased average ticket price back to 2037 ranges, and his team pays the price. It’s a small market team, after all, and with the club hanging at around .500, attendance drops to 2.3M and revenue from tickets and merchandizing drops $7.3M. Worse, the small and relatively disinterested fan base really does not like this price increase (possibly combined with the poor product), and interest crashes again to 44—a near record low.
In retrospect: the more I look at these things the more impressed I get with OOTP’s method. Of course, my response could just be a human matching a pattern and falling in love with his own diagnosis. Your mileage may vary. But when I look at Edmonton’s behavior here, I see a team that has tried to strong-arm a fanbase, and the fanbase basically telling the club to blow off. There are other great things to do with my entertainment money—things like reading science fiction, eh? This, I also admit, was something that bothered me about the whole “just raise ticket prices” mindset to begin with. Yes, we want to optimize revenue—but we want to optimize it over the long haul. To do that in OOTP, I think, means to manage the population in ways you, yourself, would like to be managed. Consider it the golden rule applied to fake fans. In other words, “we know we’re being exploited, but don’t be a dick about it.”
Regardless, 2039 sees Fan Interest crash for Edmonton.
2040
So next year Chris drops prices to $15 again, and fields a very good team (111 wins, division champion). Attendance surges back to 3.35M people. Ticket and merchandizing revenue return, and Fan Interest—which had crashed last year—is back to that “60” level from the year before. The team has essentially repaired the rift they created earlier.
Despite all this, realize that the revenue that’s being created by a Fan Interest in the 40s-60s is still only good enough to support budgets of $110M (whereas the strongest teams are sitting at $150M).
Aside: Imagine, if you will, what this might have looked like if the team had maintained that goodwill they had created in 2038 rather than cratered things in 2039. Imagine where Fan Interest might have gotten to.
It is worth noting that Edmonton’s park holds 45,000 seats. This means its max capacity is about 3.6M fans in a season. So that 3.35M performance is near peak. It is also worth noting that the young players on the team are growing up and becoming nationally recognized stars.
Regardless of it all, Edmonton’s experience of 2040 is probably about what people should expect of a small market teams (relative to the BBA) that make jumps, and this 2040 season is almost a mirror image to their 2038 season. I like it when patterns emerge.
2041, though, is going to be interesting.
2041
To be honest, I’m not totally sure what to make of Edmonton’s 2041. Their budget fell just a little ($2M). They lowered prices, which you would think would raise attendance—but attendance fell from 3.35M to 2.78M. As noted above, their stadium is not massive in size, so the capacity was still fairly well filled. Still, it all adds up to about a $6M loss in ticket and merchandising revenue.
And here’s the thing. The team played “good” baseball, winning 91 games. Note, however, that those 91 wins came in a division that a 91-game winner came in 4th. That’s right. Edmonton was the 4th place finisher in the frenzied Frontier division. I’d guess that says something for why fans were tepid. That 4th place was 12.5 games back from the division leader, after all. Will a barely middling at best fan base come out to support a 4th place team, regardless of its winning percentage? Apparently the answer is no.
A funny thing happened on the way to the playoffs, though.
That 91 wins was enough to get Edmonton a ticket to the post season as the last Wild Card spot in the Johnson League, and when the dominoes fell just right they faced up with the Yellow Springs curse, and next thing you know: here’s Landis #2.
Wow.
When we look at Fan Interest, we see that 2041 saw the team hold serve at “60.”
A lot of people would probably say that this figure should have risen. I don’t disagree, but I note the fact that it didn’t rise, and that there are arguably justifiable reasons for it to be where it wound up being. I’d guess, for example, that Fan Interest fell a bit over the season as the team's chances to win the division dropped, and that then rose back up duringthe playoff run to finish back where it started. Again, small market team. If I squint, I can see that. Edmonton has an edgy relationship with their fans at that point. And, if I were to try to fictionalize the situation there, I’d view this as a tipping point. If Edmonton can keep the wheels on, Fan Interest will grow, and maybe the club will become a “program” as I like to call them. If not, then perhaps the Jackrabbits are on the peak of their run and may fade.
This continues to make me look at that 2038 season where Edmonton blew away momentum by raising prices a second time. The point here being that in 2041, the team won a Landis, but their relationship with the fan base made for problems. The regular season performance of a 4th place team left them with a team that didn’t draw regular season revenue well enough to sustain even their $108M budget, and as we’ll see in a moment, that causes problems with player retention that influence things in ways that make total sense.
2042
The Jackrabbits enter the 2042 off-season as a two-time Landis winner and with several really hot players. To the outside world, they are cooking with gas. But that $102M budget (that, as we’ve seen, is the result of several years of working the system), is a real problem now. It means that in the off-season the team cannot afford to sign last year’s ace (Julio Alicea) to an extension, and he walks to Frontier rival Boise for a big payday. Fans, who seem to really want to believe but are still skittish, don’t like that.
The team drops prices pretty severely (from $14.00 to $11.07). No surprise then that attendance increases to near peak—especially since the team wins 106 games and the division before being eventually dumped by the Loserville Sluggers in the Landis round.
The price drop/attendance increase brings revenue in at the same rate as last year—which is not really good. Fan Interest increases slightly to 61.
Here are things that I’m wondering about: First, within the BBA world, I’m thinking again that Edmonton made a bit of a mistake in pricing. Yes, given their fan interest situation from the previous season, I like the price drop. But I’m thinking that the market probably would have been better served to bring them in more at the $13 level than $11. I’d guess that would have kept attendance up and brough in more revenue, which they need to do to keep the budget raising. As it was, the Jackrabbit budget remains a tepid $110M. In the BBA, revenue, not cash, is king, my friends.
Second, I’m wondering if the OOTP engine for adjusting Market Size is maybe soft here. Given that Edmonton is still a small market team in the BBA (despite that “above average”), I agree fan interest should be slowish to grow. But Edmonton is on a six season run of sustained performance, and they were once a “Big” market team. This makes my mind go in all sorts of directions from the meta world of game design. Regardless, while I don’t have an issue with small market teams struggling to build big budgets, I do wonder why Edmonton, in the OOTP world, has not grown market.
Which brings us to the present.
2043
Chris has dropped his prices again (currently sitting at $10), and his team is performing well at 48-33, second to the blistering start in San Antonio. Their Fan Interest has actually increased now to 62 (the data I took was from a sim before where we are at right now). Attendance is at about 86% of capacity, which is 15th best out of 32 teams. Not bad, but not great.
That $10 ticket price is the lowest in the league other than Des Moines, but I’ll note the Kernels have drawn 2.23M people while Edmonton is only at 1.6M. I’ll note, also, that DM was building fan interest even before Ed handed the reins to Geoff, but that their Fan Interest bumped with the rebranding of their stadium—which has a capacity almost 10K greater than Edmonton’s.
So, yeah. I do think this past season or three have been a tipping point for Edmonton when it comes to Fan Interest. And I also think Fan Interest is throttling the Jackrabbits as they try to become a dynastic program rather than just have a dynastic decade.
Should they dramatically drop their prices again to try to bump Fan Interest into the rabid zones? Should they stay the course and hope winning keeps working to win over the base? If they do that, how long will it be before that small, semi-loyal group gets over the hump and supports raising prices up into those $20 zones that the mega-players can run? Bottom line here is that I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that several of Edmonton’s very good players are going to be looking for serious paydays in 2045, and it seems to me that the team will need to figure out the answers to these questions by then, or else something is going to have to give.
Because, what I’m getting out of this decades-long (BBAwise, anyway) struggle to get a handle on Fan Interest is that fan bases are mercurial things that shift and change over time and across different teams. A team with a deeply avid base can probably get away with a mistake or two, but a small-market club is on a much finer line.
Until, of course, they aren’t.
By that, I mean that unlike in the real world, a small market team in OOTP can, over time, build themselves into a big market team. This is a key difference between real baseball’s financial world and OOTPs. The Kansas City Royals of the real world cannot ever become a New York or a Boston, but in the BBA an Edmonton can very well become a Las Vegas or a Sacramento.
The question that this example provides us is that Edmonton seems to be on the cusp of that conversion, and my personal guess right now is that their ability to traverse that line is going to depend on whether they can find a way to push their fan interest into the upper regions or not.
Miss you Ted.
