Right now, everyone is playing in lovely "Old League Park", which is perfectly symmetrical, league neutral, and seats 45,000. It's a lovely stadium, I'm sure, but it seems so boring. Wouldn't it be great to be able to pick your own stadium and its characteristics. Play in the Polo Grounds if you want. Play in Yankee Stadium. Play in the L.A. Colosseum. Whatever you want, you could do.
Anyway, I sent Zev an email asking if we could individualize our stadiums. He told me to put it up on the blog for discussion. So, here's my post, put out for public consumption and consideration.
My thoughts on the subject.
1. Obviously, I'm in favor of letting teams personalize their stadiums.
2. We can't let people go hog wild. For instance, a team with a ton of right handed hitters can't create a stadium with the left field fence 175 feet from home plate. That's just not right. So, we have to have some brackets around what's acceptable. My suggestions of reasonable ranges follow.
3. We need some sort of mechanism to get the stadium to Zev in a way that he can use. Setting aside the graphical issues that don't matter much in this type of league, here are the variables that can be set per park:
Name of ballpark
Type: Open, Domed (No provision for rolling roofs like Safeco and others)
Surface: Grass, Astroturf
Attendance Capacity: (Doesn't seem to have any limits on low or high, but the team front office pages imply a range of 10,000 to 75,000.)
Park Factors: RHB Avg., RHB HR, LHB Avg., LHB HR, 2B, 3B
Outfield Dimensions: Leftfield line, LF, LC, CF, RC, RF, Rightfield line
Wall Heights: Leftfield line, LF, LC, CF, RC, RF, Rightfield line
Weather Data for each month (Mar/Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct/Nov): Temperature, % chance of rain
Average wind and direction (eight choices)
You can also put in a couple of picture files, but that seems kind of pointless here.
I suspect that Zev may not be excited about sitting down to enter all of that information in. It may be that one of us could do that and then send him the resulting team files. I'd probably be willing to do that. Someone else may have a better idea.
4. Here are my thoughts on some boundaries to set on the stadiums.
a. Attendance. There should be a minimum and maximum. Let's use the 10,000 to 75,000 range implied by the team front office pages.
b. Park factors / wall heights / etc. I would say that the range should be the scope of major league history. If there's a precedent in major league history for it, you can do it. That is an awfully broad range, but I think relatively fair. (Another reasonable option would be to confine people to features, park factors, etc. that exist in current MLB stadiums.) So, as an example, Fenway's wall is 37 feet in left field and is 304-315 feet down the line (estimates vary). So, you could put in a left field wall like Fenway's in your park.
c. Weather data. Needs to be roughly comparable to some reasonable city, although it doesn't need to be the city that the team is supposedly based in.
d. When can the stadium be changed? I would suggest only changing it in the offseason and limiting how frequently it can be changed. Some rule like "the stadium cannot be changed for X years after a prior change. The only exception is when a new owner inherits a team." I'd suggest somewhere between five and ten years as the minimum period between changes. That forces a certain far-sightedness and cuts down on the efficacy of making changes just to suit a particular roster.
So, that's my idea. Thoughts? Criticisms? In favor of the idea? Against it?
I like this idea. In that other league I told you about on Friday (the one I was kicked out of), they had a stadium building plan. However, you had to buy it, using leftover cash each season (they didn't have a $10m cap like we do).
ReplyDeleteBut, I'm all for it. I can see the Scorpion Pit having strong ocean winds out to right, but with deep alleys and a mini Monster there to keep balls in the park.
But, do the strong crosswinds, left field will have a short porch. Let's see if Luis Jeon is strong enough to defeat the winds and crush some balls without getting them blown towards the left-center alleyway.
I would favor it but with costs. Maybe we could up the amount of money moving forward and play it that way.
ReplyDeleteMy main concern is that attendance revenue is directly tied to the capacity of your stadium. And that also would increase merchandise sales. So the income figures would significantly change with larger stadiums.
Once, in a solo league, I accidentally setup a park with a 450,000 capacity, instead of 45,000. I got some insane attendance money, but rarely more than 20% attendance figures.
ReplyDeleteI spent oodles on free agents the following season. :)
Perhaps the stadium capacity needs to be fixed at 45,000 to avoid disrupting the game's economics and widening the gaps between the haves and the havenots.
ReplyDeleteMy interest is really in adding a little difference among the teams and also adding to the complexity of the GM job by having teams taylor their clubs to the ballpark. For instance, the Mariners have a park that is tough on right handed hitters, but fairly decent for lefties. I find it interesting to see how management adapts to that and it adds some complexity to the task of building a team.
I'm not particularly interested in creating a sitation where successful clubs gain more revenue for the future and then have built-in an advantage over the other teams.