Major league, minor patience

Franchise

This city's record says getting a team is the easy half: the expansion fee gets paid, the building goes up, the town fills the seats. Keeping the team is the half that failed here once. In this arcade version you run an unnamed club for twelve seasons, one corpus-seeded decision per season — and the last four seasons, the keeping era, are deliberately the hardest. The score is seasons kept times fan trust, because keeping is the score.

Treasury: $45M · Trust: 50 · Streak: —Best: 0 legacy

Franchise

Run a club — yours, unnamed — for twelve seasons. Each season deals one decision seeded from a real event in this city's major-league record, and after you choose, the record tells you what actually happened here. Getting the team is the easy third. The last four seasons are the keeping era, and keeping is the whole score: seasons kept × fan trust.Mind three numbers: the treasury, fan trust (the gates follow it), and the sellout streak that starts when trust holds at 70 or better. A club with no money or no believers leaves town — and the run ends when it does.

Every move is a labeled button — fully playable by keyboard. The quotes after each choice are the real record; your club and its leagues are fiction.

The true story under the game

Every card in the deck happened here. George Shinn paid a $32.5 million expansion fee in 1987 and the town led the league in attendance in year one; Jerry Richardson's campaign for an NFL club took six years before the league's 28 owners voted yes unanimously in 1993. The Hornets sold out 371 consecutive home games from December 1988 through November 1997 — or 364, depending on which page of the record you read; the guide keeps both figures because neither has been checked against a primary attendance ledger. Then the keeping era: a 1999 trial the owner's standing never recovered from, a 2001 arena referendum that failed, a 2002 relocation the league approved before the season was over — and a do-over, almost immediately, at $300 million against the original $32.5 million. The replacement club opened in 2004 in the same building the previous team had left because it was not good enough.

The major-league era, year by year

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