Revenues and Debt
Revenues and fees are calculated automatically and tracked throughout the season, and current financial information is always available on your ledger in the Utility Program. Unlike your player and team stats which are available to all owners, your account balance is kept confidential. At the end of the season, accounts are closed out and balances forwarded to the next season.
See the Values Tables in your software for up-to-date information!
Performance Revenues
Success on the field is what brings fans into the park. Nostalgia Baseball attempts to correlate actual performance and revenue without making performance the dominant economic factor (or else the rich get richer and the poor get poorer with little prospect for change. Of course, that's probably truer to life, but it's not our league ethic). In addition to your annual owner's salary, your team generates income in the following manners:
Concessions
The most important performance incentive comes in the form of concession revenues (TV contracts, T-shirt sales etc.), which are tied directly to your team's winning percentage. The better you play, the more people want your products. A team that plays .500 ball can expect concession revenues of about 300 units, a team that plays .600 or above can expect about 500 units, and a team that plays .400 or below about 100 units. No team can earn more than 500 or less than 100 units. Since most teams will be somewhere between .400 and .600, it always pays to keep trying to win. Getting rid of your talent (the Charlie Finley tactic) comes at a price!
Fan Revenues
Every 100,000 fans drawn converts to units which are automatically deposited into your account. Your starting attendance is determined to a certain degree by your success the previous season. An average team starts the next season with roughly 20,000 fans who attend home games, a consistently good team starts with a larger fan base, and a poor team with a smaller one. A loyal half will attend games even in the worst of times; the other fickle half will grow or diminish depending on your team's performance. The quality of the visiting teams also affects attendance; the top teams attract considerably more fans than the cellar-dwellers. Two superior teams playing one another late in the year could draw as many as 50,000 fans, two terrible teams as few as 10,000.
Playoffs
The World Series Champion earns 80 units, the World Series runner-up earns 60 units, second round losers earn 40 units, and first round losers earn 20 units.
MVP & Cy Young Awards
At the end of each season, the owners vote for the Most Valuable Player and the Cy Young winner. The owners of these players get 25 units.
New Stadiums
If your team wins the stadium lottery, you have the opportunity to open another revenue stream for four consecutive seasons. This could yield an addition 250 units or so depending on the BSU value.
Rare Events and Plateaus
If one of these rare feats listed below occurs to your team or one of your players, units are deposited automatically into your account. Note: most of these events wouldn't generate higher attendance because they couldn't be foreseen by fans, but they are expected to generate higher retail sales. A log of rare events and plateaus will be kept on your ledger report. Normally units are distributed by applying a formula to the BSU amount. This amount fluctuates slightly from season to season. To see how much you might earn, consult the Values Tables in your software program.
Debt
You have two accounts: a regular account and a supplemental account. You may operate with a negative balance in your regular account; however, at the close of each season an interest charge will be assessed against any negative balance in your regular account. The only exemption occurs for owners of new stadiums, who may incur a debt without penalty for their first season in a new stadium.
Warning: Make sure your overall Net Worth is more than minus 250 units by the end of the season. Net Worth is determined by the units in the regular account plus redeemable units in the supplemental account. Thus, you could theoretically have a negative balance of 300 units in your regular account and 51 redeemable units in your supplemental account and still be solvent. The penalty for reaching the minus 250 unit threshold is severe! See Losing your franchise.