SoM NNL Replay: economic musings

I wonder if I should introduce simple team finances to provide some limitations to trades and "free agent" signings, but avoid having a completely unrestricted market (or static rosters which may be an issue if you are hit by a series of injuries...)
In addition to incentivizing moderate trading, this could even introduce the rather historical risk of financial problems for some teams, and the suspense whether leagues or teams will make it through the season at all...
There could even by an economic sub game where the winner ends up with most cash in hand, no matter what the results of the season are.

Main expenses to track would be

1. a simple salary system, e.g. weekly salaries of
• simple approach: $1 per player per week, $2 for Hall of Famers, $3 for the seeded All Stars
• more expenses with: $1 per substitute player, $2 per starting player, $3 per Hall-of-Famer, 5$ for each seeded All Star.
2. In addition, there could be travelling expenses, e.g. $0.5 per player per location change and per night away from home.

Average expenses per team would then be something like $20-25 salaries (up to $30 in the more costly one), $20-25 travelling and accommodation per week. An even split between the two sounds reasonable, on the other hand it means thtt the salary impact of trades or additional players will be nearly negligible compared to weeks with lots of travel or away games...

With an average of slightly over seven games per week, the team expenses of up to $100 need to be balanced by income of an av. of $15 per game.

The tricky part is income. Maybe something like rolling average dice (not D6) per game to determine the crowd?

• three dice as baseline
• plus one die for Friday games, resp. two dice for weekend games
• plus one die for good weather, minus one die for bad weather
• plus one die if the home team had a winning record before the current 2-3 game series
• plus one die if the home team won the game on the last day (by calendar days, i.e. doubleheader games are both looking at the previous day)
• minus one die if the home team is out of contention for the league pennant
• plus one die for world series games

Durnig the regular season, this would give between one (minimum - there will never by zero dice) and seven average dice, attendances between 2,000 and 35,000 people. With 1,000 spectators = $1 income, that might come out just right.
Game proceeds would be split evenly between teams (rounding in favor of the home team), except that the home team would get a guaranteed minimum of $3 and 10 percent of the away team's share (rounding normally).

Let's try a quick test run for the season opening series CHI @ KC: (since then I adjusted the baseline from two to three dice)

game 1: Friday, no previous records: 2+1+1+0+0+0+0 = 4 dice, attendance (die rolls courtesy of random.org) 13,000, income $13, CHI gets 5$ and KC $8.
game 2 (Sat. doublehader matinée): Saturday, home team lost the day before: 2+2+0+0+0 = 4 dice, attendance 12,000, income $12, Chi gets 5, KC gets 7
game 3 (Sat. doubleheader evening game): same dice as in the morning game, attendance 18,000; CHI gets 8, KC gets 10.

Looking at the teams I drafted, they would all have payrolls between $33 and $38 per week, plus average travel cost of $28 per week, so they will need weekly income between $53 and $60 to make ends meet.

I dno't think this will really put any restrictions on adding players to the rosters, but it might be fun to try, especially with a few to allowing players to change teams after this one month season or even half way through, in order to get more money...

Update: after adding salary information to my team rosters and doing the first few calculations, I wonder whether the separation of salary and trave cost adds anything. I guess it's easier to just add $2 to each players salary and kind of let them pay their own travel and lodging... To make ends meet, I added one more die to start with so it's now three dice plus/minus modifiers.