Media Revenue in OOTP
More basic OOTP concepts
Media Revenue in OOTP
I’ll be blunt. The biggest financial problem in contemporary baseball is media revenue.
The problem is an old one, and will be familiar to many of you. The problem is that teams don’t have equal media deals.
In the 1980s, the Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves became two of the most recognizable and popular teams in the sport. This was because of nationwide cable television coverage — coverage that erased any sense of “territorial rights.” WGN, which had broadcast Cubs games for decades, was available on cable services across the United States. The Braves, meanwhile, took full advantage of the fact that owner Ted Turner also owned the fledgling TBS station.
It was a great time for fans of National League baseball that lived outside major cities. However, it certainly wasn’t a great time for competitive balance.
It took Major League Baseball well over a decade to start addressing the problem. Most of the changes came in place after the end of the strike in 1995. For a while, the regional FOX Sportsnet system reigned supreme, allowing fans of almost all teams to watch every single game on cable television. However, the media contracts were not equal, and the uneven media revenue caused a lot of competitive balance problems.
Bill James addressed this problem in The New Historical Baseball Abstract:
Now, the worst case scenario never came to pass. However, this fundamental problem with Major League Baseball’s media contract system remains to this day. After all, why should the Los Angeles Dodgers receive so much more money for a game against the Miami Marlins than the Marlins will receive?
Never fear — you can correct this in OOTP.
Now, the first trick is figuring out where this setting is. The OOTP Wiki is incorrect — and this isn’t the only time it gets this sort of thing wrong. The options to change the national media contract rules exist under League Settings > Financials:
Note that there are two options here: one for the national media contract, and another for the local media contract.
You can fix the national media contract so that each team gets an even piece of the pie. You can also choose to have it vary based on the market size of each team. I’m not aware of that ever happening in real life.
You can also set a local media contract baseline total. Note, however that you cannot choose the same local media contract for each team. This seems to be a pretty major oversight, in my opinion.
If you really want to ensure that all teams have the same local media contract, you’ll need to go in manually and edit each team to the same total. You can, however, also force financial parity through the revenue sharing system if you like.
Now, rumors abound that Commissioner Manfred might force all clubs into a league controlled local media contract starting in 2028. This might happen, and it might not happen. However, the mere threat of this sort of system should be enough for OOTP to allow it to happen. Perhaps we’ll see something along these lines in OOTP 26?
As it currently stands, those local media contracts are determined by the size of your market, the interest your fans have in the team, and how loyal they are. Note that these are the same factors that dictate gate revenue — essentially doubling your advantage over other teams in the league.