I agree with Spleen and MarkGrace.
Those two positions make the most sense. Random events are hard to side with because half the time they can make no sense at all, or wose they can randomly help those they are meant to hurt.
It is an accepted principle that it takes money to make money. The more a team makes the more it has to spend to feed its money making machine. For instance the Yankees marketing budget might be more than it costs to fund the smaller teams. They have great TV revenues because they have a great team and market their team.
What you need is a mathmatical combination of the two positions proposed by Spleen & MG.
I am no mathmatician though... so the best way I can imagine it would be a reverse bell curve with the following theory:
A bottom of the bucket team suffering from low interest, market size and record would have a much easier time being stimulated upward through a few quality enhancements. Maybe that blue chip prospect that comes up through the minors and hits 45 homeruns his rookie year quickly generates fan interest.
A top of the line team with a high interest, huge market and 1st place record would have a harder and harder bar to hit to keep things going. Spleen hit it on the money with his analysis. If a team keeps getting 1st place but can't turn out the rookies or the record slips a little will see a much harder hit in fan interest than normal.
Maybe a meaningless numerical example...
Last place team loses 10 more games than it did previous year = -1 fan interest
First place team loses 10 more games than it did previous year = -5 fan interest.
Both had similiar ranking decrease but the results are harder for the team everyone expects to win. This would be the "Atlanta" problem. The reverse numbers would work too. A first place team goes up 10 wins gets a minimal boost and a last place team wins 10 more games and gets a super boost.
There would have to be a point that the first place team could not feed its fire needed to keep the money coming in at previous levels. There are only so many games to win anyway!
No random penalties... use economic principles to fix it. Then everyone knows the score.
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