About The Game

Season Features

DMB Season Database Structure

All Diamond Mind Baseball season include everything you need to begin playing highly-realistic games and/or organizing fantasy leagues the moment you install them -- team rosters, a large pool of players with detailed ratings and statistics, league schedules, ballpark ratings, and so on.

Complete team rosters. With the exception of a few players on a few of our Classic Past Seasons, all season include everyone who appeared in a big-league game. Those exceptions involve a small number of players who rarely played and had almost no impact on their teams.

Combined players. If a player appeared on more than one real-life team, we generally create one player record for each of his teams and one combined record. The team-specific records are used for detailed season replays using real-life rosters; the combined record is used for leagues that draft new rosters. With the exception of a few players on a few of our Classic Past Seasons, all of our season include combined records for all multi-team players.

Leagues. Every season is set up with one or more leagues. In most cases, that means putting the teams into their real-life leagues. For greatest teams sets, we use a fictional league.

Schedules. Every season includes at least one set of league schedules. In most cases, we include the real-life "as-played" schedules for the two leagues. An as-played schedule shows all games on the dates they were actually played, reflecting rainouts and other changes.

Current Seasons and some recent Deluxe Past Seasons also include an "as-scheduled" version to the real-life "as played" schedule as an alternative that you can install.

With greatest teams sets, we supply a fictional schedule involving those teams.

Parks. Every season contains detailed information about the home parks for the teams included. The park information includes physical details (such as wall distances and heights, size of foul territory, playing surface), weather information (temperature, rain frequency, wind strength and direction), and statistical park factors.

Real-life batting statistics. All seasons include a full set of real-life batting statistics, including all of the categories set out in the official rule book.

Real-life pitching statistics. All seasons include an extensive set of real-life pitching statistics, including all of the categories set out in the official rule book. Current Season and Deluxe Past Seasons also include a number of modern pitching statistics such as holds, blown saves, opposition stolen bases, inherited runners, and run support.

Real-life fielding statistics. All seasons include real-life fielding statistics, broken down by position. For the Current Season and Deluxe Past Seasons, these statistics include games, games started, defensive innings, putouts, assists, errors, double plays, fielding percentage, and passed balls, plus three modern stats for catchers, passed balls, stolen bases allowed, caught stealing, and pickoffs.

Some Classic Past Seasons and Greatest Teams sets are missing the data for games, games started, and double plays. None of the classic seasons include defensive innings or the catcher stealing and pickoff information.

Real-life left/right splits. The Current Season, and Deluxe Past Seasons include complete left/right splits for all batters and pitchers. Performance in DMB games is based on these splits.

For Classic Past Seasons, left/right splits are not available in the historical record, so we give each player a standard left/right advantage based on the results of a multi-year study we conducted. This way, left/right strategy remains a very important factor in your games even if you are playing with a season disk that doesn't have left/right stats.

Because many of the Greatest Teams come from the classic era, the players are rated based on standard left/right differentials rather than actual left/right stats.

Games started by position. The Current Season, and Deluxe Past Seasons include games started at each position versus left- and right-handed pitchers. These values are quite interesting but do not affect player performance in the game. They are included mainly to help generate manager profiles that reflect how each player was used in real life.

Ratings. All seasons include a full set of batting, pitching and defensive ratings for every player. Offensively, players are rated for skills such as sacrifice bunting, bunting for a hit, stealing frequency and success rate, and taking extra bases on hits and fly balls. Pitchers are rated for such talents as their ability to hold runners close, their tendency to balk and throw wild pitches, and their durability as starters or relievers or both. Defensive ratings cover range, error rates, passed ball rates, and throwing.

Event tables. All batters and pitchers have an event table, a hidden set of ratings that play a large part in resolving the outcome of the batter-pitcher confrontations that make up a game. These ratings interact to determine how often a pitcher throws strikes, how often a batter swings, how often those swings result in a swinging strike, a foul ball or a ball put in play, and what events take place when the ball is put in play.

These event tables are adjusted for the context in which each player compiled his statistics -- the era, league rules, and effects of his home park.

They play a fundamental role in providing you with very high levels of statistical accuracy and the flexibility to do such things as (a) play games pitch-by-pitch or batter-by-batter, (b) draft new rosters and have player performances automatically adapt to the new level of competition and new home parks, and (c) play meaningful games between teams from very different eras.

Salaries. We began compiling salary information with the introduction of our 1999 Season and plan to continue including salaries on newly-developed Current Seasons. Because this information is not used by the game in any way, and because historical salary data is not widely available, we have no plans to add salaries to any other seasons.

Real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups. All of our Current and Deluxe seasons, and some of our Classic seasons, include a complete set of player transactions (including trades, disabled-list moves, promotions, demotions, and suspensions) and the actual starting lineups for every game played that year.

If you choose to play the season using real-life rosters and the transaction feature turned on, Diamond Mind Baseball ensures that the right players are active on each day of the season. And if you turn on the use of real-life lineups, DMB automatically loads those lineups when you start each game.

These features are optional. You can still play the season with any lineups you want, making transactions as you see fit, or even with a totally new set of team rosters. But for folks who enjoy recreating past seasons, the transactions and lineups enable you to achieve higher levels of realism with no additional effort.

Manager profiles. The Diamond Mind Baseball computer manager uses a manager profile to guide its decision-making. A manager profile contains starting lineups versus left- and right-handed pitching; depth charts that are used to set up platoons, defensive replacements, and utility players at every position; the starting rotation; relief pitching assignments (mopup, long relief, setup, closer); and tactical preferences such as bunting, using relievers, pinch hitting, and positioning the defense.

Every season includes a manager profile for every team. Whether you want to autoplay entire seasons, play games with the computer manager handling the other team, or just quick play a few innings a game, the profiles are already set up and ready to go.

Summing up. It should be clear by now that there's a ton of information in every one of these season disks, regardless of the category they fall into. But there are a few differences, and here's a table comparing the different categories of season disks:

In the above table, an entry of "Most" or "Varies" indicates that some season disks in that category include the information and some don't. The details are provided on the pages that describe each category of season disk in more detail.

Transferring Statistics

Stats Collection Is Easy With DMB

If you are a member of a Diamond Mind Baseball league in which games are played on more than one computer, you can use the stats transfer functions to consolidate the results of those games on one computer and periodically issue updates that can easily be installed on the various computers used in the league.

NOTE: Please be sure you are not using these features to illegally distribute copies of our season disks. Each member of a league who is going to be playing games on his/her own computer must own a copy of the game and the season disk being used for the league. It is a violation of copyright law to send a DMB database to a league member who does not own a copy of the season disk upon which the league is based. 

Here's how the process works:

• while setting up the league, the commissioner chooses league options that (if activated) will automatically generate a boxscore, scoresheet and game account file after each game, so league managers don't have to remember to save these items manually. 

• the commissioner chooses a menu command that automatically zips up all of the files in the league database and creates a single transfer file that is ready to be sent (usually as an email attachment) to league members. 

• each manager uses another menu command to install the updated league database. Neither the commissioner nor the league managers need to own a copy of PKZIP or any other tool of that sort, as the capability is built in. 

• managers can generate reports, move players between the active roster and the reserve rosters, update their manager profiles, and play games using the update season totals. 

• after playing games, making roster moves, or modifying his manager profile, the manager chooses a menu command that leads him through a simple three-step process to select the games, manager profiles and transactions to export. DMB keeps track of which games and transactions were already there at the beginning of the play cycle and automatically selects the ones that have been added since. (You can override these selections if you ever need to send something to the commissioner a second time.) When the selections are complete, a single transfer file is ready to be sent to the commissioner. 

• to import these changes, the commissioner chooses a menu command that leads him through another simple three-step process to select the games, manager profiles and transactions to import. When the selections are complete, the file is imported, and DMB updates the schedule, year-to-date statistics, injury logs and anything else that is affected, after validating the file to ensure that the same information is not imported more than once. 

• after the imports have been completed, the commissioner can choose another menu command that rebuilds the usage and streaks information. Now that all of the games are in one place and can be evaluated in the proper sequence, DMB goes through the game-by-game logs and figure hitting streaks and fatigue information correctly.

Player Profiles

Working With Player Profiles

When you're playing a game, choosing lineups, thinking about making roster moves, setting up a manager profile, or participating in a draft, you often want to know more about the players you're working with. How does he do against left-handed pitching? How many positions is he rated at and what are those ratings? Is he healthy right now? How many pitches did he throw yesterday?

That's why we give you access to the player profile window from most places in the product where player names are displayed.

The batting tab provides two blocks of batting stats (on tabs labelled primary and secondary), full left/right splits, and a summary of the player's most important ratings.

The pitching tab shows five blocks of pitching stats, plus full left/right splits, and key pitching ratings.

The fielding tab provides a full set of fielding statistics broken down by position.

The status tab summarizes fatigue information (pitches thrown in the past five days, batters faced as a catcher over the past ten days), injury status, and other usage information.

And the starts tab shows how often each player was in the starting lineup at each defensive position against left- and right-handed pitchers.

This information provides a very complete picture of each player, but we know that sometimes you wish to look at more than one player at a time. That's why the player profile window has a list of players in the upper left corner with two arrow buttons that allow you to cycle through a relevant group of players. If you've called up the profile window from a team roster, that group includes the players on the team. If you've called up the profile window from the game window, that group may consist of the current batting order for the team. Call it up from a list of free agents and it includes all of those free agents.

For players who appeared on more than one team in your DMB season, the 'Show combined stats' checkbox allows you to toggle between showing that player's stats for one team and his combined stats for all teams that he played for.

Finally, to the right of that checkbox is a drop-down list of the stages of the season. If you're in the midst of a post-season series, you can choose to look back at this player's performance during any previous stage of the season (the regular season or a previous playoff series).

Organizing Leagues and Teams

Using the Organizer

The Organizer window enables you to quickly find and work with any item in your active database. Click on the tabs at the bottom to display lists that show important information about the teams, parks, players, leagues and other contents of your database. On the player list, for example, you can see each player's position, batting and throwing hand, and his current team affiliation or free agent status.

The toolbar buttons provide access to the tools you need to create, copy, modify, delete and import any of these items, giving you the flexibility to create just about any type of league you want. You can do this using teams, players, parks and eras that you create yourself or import from different Diamond Mind season disks.

You can organize teams into leagues of up to four divisions of 16 teams each, and you have the option to create an organization that combines two leagues for inter-league and/or post-season play.

And, if you're running a league that uses Diamond Mind Baseball, you can organize notes (with bylaws, newsletters, or anything else you want) that will be distributed among members of your league using the new league management tools.

Roster Management

Managing Your Roster

As you move through your season, you can use the roster management and manager profile window to send players to the farm and call them up, move them on and off the disabled list, release players, sign free agents, and make other moves.

The roster window uses color to distinguish the players who are on the active roster, the reserve roster and the disabled list. To make a move, simply right-click on the name of the player, then choose from the commands on the popup menu that appears.

The other tabs make it easy for you to set up the manager profile that guides the computer manager in games that you do not play yourself. Using these tabs, you can set your starting rotation, relief roles, starting lineups versus left- and right-handed pitchers, platoons, defensive replacements, utility roles, manager tendencies, and player-specific tendencies. These can be updated at any time during the season.

Selected DMB seasons come with every real-life roster move and an option to play or autoplay those seasons using the actual game-by-game starting lineups and day-to-day rosters. When you use one of these seasons, and when you choose the option (one of the settings for a league) to use the real-life transactions, the status of each player changes automatically as you move through the season.