On Liquidity

Among the various stats that Baseball Mogul generates is a curious percentage called "liquidity". If you pull up the Front Office screen for a team in OOTP, you will not find any mention of liquidity anywhere.

The Baseball Mogul help files (at least the ones on the web) make it clear that "liquidity is not used in the game" -- I suppose it's provided as a matter of curiousity. In the scant number of posts that mention liquidity those posts either a) use liquidity in some other sense than the BM definition, or b) assume that having a high liquidity is a factor in lowering fan support, although Clay Dreslough or any of the the other programmers have never made a definitive statement.

BM defines liquidity as the cash on hand divided by the value of a franchise. For example, suppose your team has $3 million cash on hand and the franchise has been assessed at $300 million by Baseball Mogul's engine. Your team's liquidity would therefore be 3 mil/300 mil, or 0.01 -- 1 percent liquidity. If the team were in debt by $6 million, the liquidity would be -6 mil/300 mil, or -0.02 -- negative 2 percent liquidity.

This definition of liquidity jibes -- sort-of -- with the real definition of liquidity. Briefly, liquidity is the percentage of assets you have that can be quickly turned into cash.

Let's assume you own a business. The assets can be both cash assets and non-cash assets: examples of "non-cash" assets include land contracts, vehicles, equipment, or insurance policies -- in order to sell any of these, you'd have to put them on the market and it might take a while to get your money.

Baseball Mogul uses cash assets/total value (as opposed to assets/liabilities). Furthermore, one can have negative liquidity because one's cash could be "tied up" in debt.

Did any of that make sense? No. Good.

It seems that Baseball Mogul assumes that the only cash asset of a franchise is...well...cash. Everything else is assumed to be non-liquid -- the stadium, the players, the equipment and all the non-tangible assets such as trademarks, etc. This seems to make sense -- there are few things that a franchise owns that it can turn to money instantly -- most of a franchise's value is tied up in the stadium, the property, and player contracts.

It's a pity that Baseball Mogul cannot make use of liquidity, or that if they do make use of it, we're not told how and why it is used. In effect, it is a useless stat -- sort of like the names of the minor league teams in Baseball Mogul -- you go to the League Editor screen and fill in the names of the teams. You can call the teams anything you want, even put one hundred minor league teams in New York City -- the names and locations you choose have nothing to do with how the game plays out, whereas OOTP actually has a functioning minor league system where city location is important. Baseball Mogul needs to either drop liquidity, or find some use for it.