[Abu Taha]

Okay, I did some research using the Forbes lists for the past several years and a bunch of other sources. I looked at Metropolitan area, and Nielson TV markets, attendance and past performance to come up with what I think is a pretty accurate picture of 2006 MLBs finances.

I started with Forbes and calculated how much each team had to spend on players and personell if you take out non-player costs (the average MLB non-player cost was 54 million and it was not corrolated to market size).

From there I subtracted Attendance Revenue based on 2005 attendance multiplied by 15 dollars.

Next I calculated Market Size and Fan Loyalty. For Market size, I just went with metropolitan area. MLB cities are pretty big, so the lowest is 5; this is easy to tinker for anybody that feels like it. Fan Loyalty was a little more complex. First, I looked at Gate Revenue divided by metropolitan area. The idea isn't to find what team's fans are the most passionate but who puts the most money per capita in their team's coffers, depending on how their team is doing. I think this is as good a definition what the game does with Fan Loyalty as any.

To figure out who had the best Fan Loyalty, I looked over performance for the past 5 years and compared performance to average per capita gate. Based on performance, I divided the teams into 3 categories: Perenial losers, Perenial winners and Mixed. There was a definite distinciton in the average per captia gate that corralated to performance (and didn't corralate to market size, as one might expect). In each category of teams, I divided indivual per captia by the group average to get relative fan loyalty. St Loius was by far the best; Florida was by far the worst. (For large teams like NYY, I capped population at 6.7 million.)

Using Fan Loyalty, expanded Neison Markets and Market Size, I calculated expected Media Revenue. It looked pretty accurate (for example TEX came in at 25.5 and news sources say their local TV revenues are at 25 million).

I subtracted that from the total and whatever is left I called Merchandizing. This way, teams like Boston - who have lower attendance due to a small stadium but still rake in the dough - come up with really high and stable merchandizing revenue, while teams in the opposite situation (Angels) don't.

Finally, I used NY Times calculations of revenue sharing to figure out what percentage of each team's incomes was due to revenue sharing, and multiplied that percetnage against my player budget numbers. I added cash to teams recieving Revenue Sharing (subtracting from Merchandizing) and added to Merchandizing for those contributing. Anyway, this is what I came up with.