Classic Past Seasons

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Features of Classic Past Seasons

Our Classic Past Seasons share most of the features of our Current and Deluxe Past Seasons. They include leagues, schedules, complete team rosters (in almost all cases), extensive batting/pitching/fielding statistics, detailed ballpark information, complete player ratings, and manager profiles tailored for the rosters of each team. In short, you get everything you need to start playing highly-realistic games the moment you install a Classic Past Season.

For modern seasons, we have the advantage of working with play-by-play data that enables us to compile and use certain modern statistics that are not available in baseball's historical records.

For older seasons, we have access to various encyclopedias that provide the batting, pitching and fielding statistics that are set out in the official rules of baseball. And, for some seasons, we have augmented those official statistics by going through every boxscore.

The lack of play-by-play data does not affect your ability to play highly-realistic games, but it does lead to some differences between our Classic Past Seasons and Deluxe Past Seasons.

Deluxe Past Seasons	Classic Past Seasons
Include all batting, pitching and fielding statistics, including modern stats	Include official batting, pitching, and fielding stats, but not modern stats like holds, blown saves, and defensive innings
Include left/right splits for all batters and pitchers	Do not display left/right splits
Batting/pitching performance is based on left/right splits	Batting/pitching performance is based on overall statistics with a standard left/right adjustment for all players (see note below)
Includes games started by position for all seasons	Includes games started by position only for some seasons.
All Deluxe seasons include real-life transactions and game-by-game starting lineups	Some Classic seasons include real-life transactions and game-by-game starting lineups

A comment on left/right splits

Some people feel that the lack of left/right splits inevitably leads to a less-realistic experience than they would get using any of our season disks that include those splits. In some ways that is true, but we contend that there are plenty of good arguments in favor of using standard splits, too.

The use of left/right splits is a plus when you have a player who has established a consistent pattern of succeeding with the platoon advantage and failing when at a disadvantage. For example, some left-handed batters hit righties quite well but are at a complete loss against lefties. And some left-handed pitchers are very effective against lefty hitters but are pounded by righties. Those players tend to be relegated to platooning on offense or being used only in a specialized bullpen role.

On the other hand, every season produces a significant number of players who happened to compile very good or excellent stats against one side or the other in a limited amount of playing time. It's not hard to show that many of these extreme performances are due to chance, not some talent of the players. And many DMB managers are more than happy to take advantage of these fluky performances to give these players a much more important role on their teams than those players would ever get in real life.

The use of standard left/right adjustments for our Classic Past Seasons has the virtue of dramatically reducing the number of players who fall into this category.

Suppose a right-handed batter was 10-for-30 (.333) against lefties and 10-for-60 (.167) against righties. Overall, he was 20-for-90, good for an overall average of only .222. And let's suppose this pattern was not representative of the player's long-term performance but rather a one-year anomaly.

On a Deluxe Past Season, a manager might look at that player and get very excited about the idea of using him only as a pinch hitter against lefties and saving those 30 atbats for critical late-inning situations.

On a Classic Past Season, a manager would look at him as a .222 hitter who could reasonably be expected to bat something like .235 against lefties and something like .215 against righties. For many players, this is a much more reasonable view of that player's ability to contribute.

So there are some good arguments on both sides. The standard splits skew our outlook of certain players who have not shown that they can hold their own when the left/right matchup is unfavorable. But they eliminate a large number of situations where a DMB manager might be able to use 20/20 hindsight to give a mediocre player an important role.

There's no simple answer to the question of which is better.