HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!
Believe it or not, Imagine Sports is 10 years old. We started working with Tom Tippett to build the online version of Diamond Mind in the summer of 2005, and it was 10 years ago this week that we fired up the system for the first time.
10 years is a long time, and we're happy and honored that you have taken this journey with us. To celebrate 10 years, we're having a $10 off anniversary special for the rest of November:
$10 off anything and everything in the Diamond Mind store!
Enter this code at checkout for your discount: ImagineSports10
The fine print: This offer expires at 11:59pm EST on November 30, 2015.
No returns or refunds are allowed on sale items.
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2015 Season Release in December!
2015 was a wild season in MLB, from the amazing turn-around of the Houston Astros and New York Mets to the World Series championship run by the Kansas City Royals. You'll soon be able to relive it all in Diamond Mind. Work on the 2015 season download is underway with a target release set for the usual mid-December date.
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Diamond Mind Version 11 Bug Fix Patch
Based on your feedback, work is underway for an update to address bugs in DMB version 11. We will notify you of a release date as we get closer to completion and have a better idea when it will be ready. If you have not already done so, please send any bugs you may have discovered and any other suggestions to DMB_Support@imaginesports.com.
The 2015 Major League Baseball season may be over, but it's
always baseball season with Diamond Mind!
PLAY BALL!
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Developed in conjunction with Dan Szymborski using his ZiPS projection system, the DMB 2015 Season Projection database is will include something new by being dynamic – we will update the player projections around the All-Star Break to reflect performance in the season to that point and then projected through the remainder of the season. At the end of the season, we update the projections again for the playoff teams.
If you purchase the DMB 2015 Dynamic Projection database, you will receive these updates free of charge as soon as the updates are ready.
You can purchase the DMB 2015 Dynamic Projection database in the online store for $29.95, which includes the initial Projection database plus the two free updates (mid-season and for the playoffs).
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New Deluxe Past Seasons Available on April 30, 2015
The 1969 season is the most recent to get the Deluxe treatment – the DPS version of 1969 will be available on April 30, 2015. You can purchase the 1969 deluxe season in the online store for $24.95.
If you already own the Classic Past Season of 1969, you can upgrade to Deluxe for $10.00. Just email usto get started. Once we’ve verified your ownership of the 1969 CPS, we’ll send you a promotional code so you can purchase the Deluxe version at the upgrade price.
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NEW: Diamond-Mind.com!
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a new look! Earlier this year, we unveiled a new DMB website and store. Head over and check it out. It’s still a work in progress, so we’d appreciate your feedback. Please send any suggestions to DMB_Support@imaginesports.com.
Spring is in the air! Happy Opening Day from the Diamond Mind team!
PLAY BALL!
Two new All-Time Greatest Players (AGP) databases are now available. Unlike DMB’s season downloads, the players in AGP are rated to reflect their career performance rather than that of a single season. Players with longer careers were rated based on their best series of peak seasons, while players with shorter careers were rated based on their entire careers. This effectively normalizes career length by removing the “penalty” of long careers, preventing the dilution of the statistical decline in later years of long-career stars. Each player’s statistics are then normalized* relative to the era and parks in which each played.
AGP2015 is available in two volumes:
All-time Greatest Players 2015 Volume 1: Pre-1969
This AGP database gives you a great way to play games using more than 2100 of the best players in baseball history that played before 1969. In addition, Volume 1 includes more than 100 of the greatest Negro Leagues Players, normalized to MLB standards. Volume 1 players are organized into 48 teams based on the real-life franchises they were most closely affiliated with during their peak periods.
All-time Greatest Players 2015 Volume 2: Post-1969
The AGP 2015 Volume 2 database gives you a great way to play games using more than 2100 of the best players in baseball history who played in 1969 and after. In addition, Volume 2 includes more than 20 of the greatest Nippon Professional Baseball players from Japan, normalized to MLB standards. Volume 2 players are organized into 48 teams based on the real-life franchises they were most closely affiliated with during their peak periods.
Each volume is available for $29.95. Want both volumes? Buy the complete AGP2015 two-volume set for $49.95, a $10 discount.
If you are an owner of the AGP2006 database, contact dmb_info@imaginesports.com for a 25% discount code on either or both AGP2015 Volumes (discount cannot be used in combination with the $10 discount described above).
To get your AGP2015, click here. Available for version 10 and 11 only.
Don’t have version 11 yet? If you are a registered owner of any DMB game version, you can get $5 off the price of DMB version 11. Email DMB_info@imaginesports.com to request a discount code.
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Happy Opening Day from the Diamond Mind team!
July 20 , 2007
Welcome to the second edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2007. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
Topics for this issue:
A Word on the Future of Diamond Mind Baseball
The 9c Patch is Here!
2007 Projection Disk Additions
David Pyke Joins the Diamond Mind Team
Diamond Mind in the News
Given some of the most recent posts on the DMB Forum, I thought it might be a good idea to provide some more information about how I got involved with Diamond Mind Baseball, our plans and goals for the company and the product and also to share the good news about the 9b patch.
History
I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, about an hour from Pittsburgh, and was a die-hard Pirates fan. It sure was a good time to be a boy cheering on the Bucs...I started getting into baseball in 1971 (which turned out to be a fantastic year to start) and when the Pirates won the series for the second time in the 70’s in 1979, I actually felt like I was family.
Soon after becoming a baseball fan, I became enthralled with baseball simulation games. I started by playing Strat-o-Matic and eventually graduated to Earl Weaver Baseball when PCs came about. I started to sour on baseball with the strikes, and I swore off the game after the World Series was cancelled due to the lock-out in ’94. However, it would be a baseball simulation game that brought me back - a friend pushed me to play the Bill James Classic Baseball (BJCB) game in 1996, which used DMB as its sim engine. I was hooked again!
After leaving my last company, I considered a lot of different options but kept coming back to how much I enjoyed baseball simulations and how big an opportunity I thought there was in bringing sports simulation and other strategy games to a wider audience, and that’s when I decided to start Simnasium (now called Imagine Sports). In particular, I believed that many more sports fans would get into simulations if they were done right, and the internet provided ways to get those greater numbers of players than had existed before.
I knew from playing BJCB that the Diamond Mind engine is the most realistic baseball simulation, and I decided that we really needed DMB if we were to produce a great online baseball game. So, I called Tom, and we discussed our visions and opportunities for utilizing DMB and bringing it to a wider audience. We started with a license agreement.
During the design process for our online game, I played DMB over and over again and came to appreciate
even more what a truly great game it is. As you already know, the meticulous attention to detail and incredible baseball knowledge of Tom and the DMB team is evident throughout the game. I also realized that a lot more could be done with the game, and we set out to do just that.
After a very intense development process, the online version of DMB launched under the name "Total Baseball" in March 2006 to very good reviews. We believe the game offers an interesting variation on the PC game experience by allowing players to compete online against other players from around the world without the need to download software or rely on anyone to run the games. By automating the process, many more can enjoy DMB competing against others. We have been very happy with the feedback on the game to date. We have also been excited to see ESPN use DMB for a number of its feature stories in the last few months including its season preview and recent stories about the Hall of Fame, Jackie Robinson and Roger Clemens, as well as the big season preview, all of which generated significant interest in DMB.
Soon after we launched "Total Baseball," Tom and I both realized how well our teams were working together and that it would make good sense to merge our efforts. Tom was also becoming more busy with
non-DMB obligations, and joining forces would allow him to focus his DMB time exclusively on the aspects of the game he does best and, in fact, finds most rewarding (like refining the game engine) and leave the rest (marketing, operations, etc.) to us. Most importantly, as a combined entity we’d have more resources to devote to improving the game and bringing it to a broader audience.
But you should know that we are still working on improving the core PC Game. In fact, Tom and I agreed
that once he had transferred the business functions, our first priorities should be to get the 2006 season and 2007 projection disks out on time and get out the 9b patch. Since you all had waited so long for that patch, we also decided to add in some things that were planned for version 10, such as the play-by-play enhancements, at no charge. It’s just a little something extra to thank you for your patience.
Current Plans
I know there have been a lot of rumors on the message board forums about our plans for the offline and online versions of DMB. Let me start with by directly addressing the biggest concern:
We do not have any plans to discontinue the offline (PC) game.
Quite the contrary, actually...we are working on improving it.
First, we will be releasing the 2007 Season Disk in December and 2008 Projection Disk in the beginning of 2008. We will actually start taking pre-orders for the 2007 Season Disk and the 2008 Projection Disk before the end of the 2007 baseball season.
Second, we have already looked at making a lot of improvements to the core game play and user interface
in the PC version of DMB. Right now, we are figuring out how to best update the code base to make these changes possible.
Finally, we have added an additional tech support resource. David Pyke joins the team to help Luke Kraemer with tech support issues so that Luke will now have more time to work on improvements to DMB. (See Luke's article in this newsletter for more info on David's joining the team.)
I'm looking forward to a bright future for Diamond Mind Baseball!
In case you haven't heard...the 9c Patch is available now! Just go to www.diamond-mind.com to download the 9c patch.
NOTE: It is important that you complete any games in progress and have the DMB game shut down completely BEFORE you install the patch.
Enhancements in the version 9c patch:
Scoring bug fixes in version 9c patch:
Other bug fixes in version 9c patch:
Each year, when we're selecting the players who appear on the March edition of our Projection Disk, we strive to include everyone who is likely to show up on an opening day roster. When those rosters are finally revealed, I'm never happy when I see names that don't already appear on the disk.
To be fair, it may be unrealistic for us to bat 1.000 when picking those players. To do so would require that we cast a very wide net, perhaps wide enough to include 2500 or 3000 players instead of the 1800-plus we cover now, and it's not at all clear that adding hundreds of marginal players would add enough value to the disk to justify all the extra work.
There are many reasons why a player might not make our first cut. Someone can come out of retirement unexpectedly. A young player might be promoted all the way from the low minors based on a good spring. A well-traveled veteran who doesn't project to be good can snag a job based on experience and a top-flight attitude. A rash of injuries can temporarily open a roster spot for a replacement-level player.
Still, it's always a bit disheartening when we miss someone. In past years, we've generally found the need to add 6 to 12 players to the April update. This year it was a record total of 15, so we wondered whether this was just an anomaly or whether our selection methods were somehow lacking.
After further review, we've concluded that there were good reasons why most of these players were excluded. Here are their stories (stats through July 3):
Alberto Castillo, c, Bal -- This veteran backup catcher was promoted after starter Ramon Hernandez was placed on the disabled list. He didn't make the first disk because he's 37 years old and appeared to be well down the Boston depth chart before he was traded to Baltimore in late March. In the first half of the season, he batted .161 in 31 atbats.
Gustavo Molina, c, ChA -- Strictly a catch-and-throw guy who wasn't on our March disk because his bat didn't measure up. It took him seven years to reach AA and he didn't hit when he got there. His minor-league career OPS is .652, and it was worse in 2006 when he split time between AA and AAA. Molina was demoted after going 1 for 18 in the first six weeks of the season.
Josh Hamilton, of, Cin -- Perhaps the most intriguing story in the NL this year, Hamilton didn't make our first cut because his well-chronicled battle with addiction limited him to 55 relatively unsuccessful plate appearances over the past four seasons. But he had a great spring, he has a ton of talent, and he's been a significant contributor so far in 2007.
Alejandro De Aza, cf, Flo -- A speedy center fielder with a career minor-league OPS of .720 and only a half-season of experience above A ball, De Aza batted .354 in the Grapefruit League to snare the starter role at a position that was a major hole for the Marlins going into spring training. After two weeks, he was sitting near the .322 OBP we projected for him, but a stress fracture in his ankle has kept him off the field ever since.
Joakim Soria, rhr, KC -- Soria wasn't on our first disk because he did most of his recent work in Mexico. But he's off to a great start with the Royals, posting a 2.27 ERA in 32 relief appearances.
Joe Smith, rhr, NYN -- Smith is a legitimate prospect who was taken in the third round of the 2006 draft and is ranked 9th in the Mets system by Baseball America. We didn't include him on the March disk because he's so new to professional ball, having pitched 20 dominant innings in low-A and 13 unimpressive innings in AA last year. Like Soria, Smith got off to an excellent start in 2007, tossing 15 scoreless innings before allowing his first run in mid-May. Since then, however, his ERA has been in the fives.
Jay Marshall, lhr, Oak -- This soft-tossing side-arming lefty specialist posted a stunning 1.04 ERA in 62 relief innings in the high-A Carolina League last year. He's been successful throughout his minor-league career, but it took him four seasons just to get out of rookie ball. His lack of experience in the higher minors was the reason we left him off last time around. But the A's jumped him all the way to the big leagues, so they must be impressed with his sub-.400 career OPS allowed against lefties. In the majors, he's been getting lefties out (.617 OPS) but has been pounded by righties (.945 OPS) en route to a 5.60 ERA.
Don Kelly, if, Pit -- Kelly showed enough promise to make our projection disk in past seasons, but he didn't make the cut this time because his career stalled in the high minors and he's gotten a little old to retain his prospect status. His OPS in two AAA seasons is only .620, and this year he batted .154 in 26 atbats before being sent back down.
Brandan Morrow, rhr, Sea -- A very highly regarded prospect, Morrow was taken with the fifth overall pick in last year's amateur draft. The only question is the speed with which he has been promoted. Morrow logged only 16 pro innings last year, and while he was successful, he did walk 9 batters in those 16 innings. In 2007, he's been hard to hit (.236 average, .318 slugging) but has walked 33 in 31 innings.
Sean White, rhr, Sea -- Unlike Morrow, White is not a top prospect, but he does have over 400 innings of pro experience. Still, this was a puzzling choice, because White had a career ERA of 4.00, struggled at AA last year, and had never pitched in AAA. Evidently, he won the job because of a 1.59 spring ERA, but 5 walks and 6 strikeouts in 17 spring innings doesn't impress me much. Before going on the DL a few weeks ago, White's ERA was 7.03 in 24 innings.
Jamie Burke, c, Sea -- Like Castillo, Burke is a veteran backup catcher, but Burke has done most of his work in the high minors, while Castillo has logged over 1000 major-league atbats. Many teams lean toward defense when choosing a backup catcher, but Burke's more of an offensive threat than a catch-and-throw guy. To date, Burke has batted .385 in 52 atbats.
Gary Glover, rhs, TB -- Glover is a 30-year-old pitcher who missed all of 2006. Primarily a starter in the minors and reliever in the majors, Glover has posted career ERAs between 4.50 and 5.00 in both roles and pretty much at all levels. We didn't include him in March because he projected as a replacement-level pitcher. And he's performed at a replacement level with a 5.36 ERA in 42 relief innings.
Matt Kata, super sub, Tex -- You probably saw him first when he had a decent half-season for Arizona in 2003, but his major-league numbers declined slowly from there and he spent most of 2005 and all of 2006 in the minors. In recent seasons, he has added all three outfield positions to his former utility-infielder profile, and that versatility is his biggest asset today. Nevertheless, he was designated for assignment after batting .186 in 70 atbats, elected free agency, and then signed with the Pirates.
Levale Speigner, rhr, Was -- A marginal prospect who is ranked 29th in the Nationals system by Baseball America , Speigner has had a decent minor-league career, mostly in relief. He allowed 14 baserunners in his first 5 innings, settled down to produce a string of good results out of the pen, and then got crushed in six starts - 31 earned runs in 20 innings - to push his ERA to 8.78 at the mid-way point.
Jesus Flores, c, Was -- Flores is a legitimate prospect who is ranked 11th in his team's system by Baseball America and has belted 33 homers in 912 minor-league atbats. So why wasn't he on the March disk? Mainly because he's only 22 years old, and even though his defensive skills are impressive, it's extremely rare for a team to trust a major-league pitching staff to a young catcher with no experience above A ball. (Feel free to insert your own comment about whether the Nationals actually have a major-league pitching staff this year.) A .634 OPS indicates that he still has work to do offensively.
There you have it. Fifteen players who were left off the March disk because they didn't project to be good enough to win a job, didn't have enough experience at higher levels, or played in a foreign league.
With hindsight, we might have been able to make a case for including a couple of these guys, but in my view, none of them was a clear mistake given the information we had in late February.
I’d like to welcome David Pyke to the DMB Tech Support team! Some of you know David by his DMB Forum username of "diesel." David will be taking responsibility for DMB tech support issues so that I can spend more time working on enhancements to the Diamond Mind software. I’ll be working closely with David in his first month or so to train him on our procedures and be sure you receive the same level of service you are accustomed to. Accordingly, since David and I are on opposite sides of the country, please use email as your primary means of communication with us and as your first method of requesting support (support@diamond-mind.com). This will ensure that your issues are handled in a timely manner. We understand that some issues are more pressing than that, so you can continue to use the 800 number (800-400-4803) when needed. Pat will direct the request to whoever is best suited to respond. I’ll still be involved in tech support, overseeing David’s work and working with him to solve any major issues that may come up.
Welcome David!
ESPN asked Imagine Sports what we thought about the return of Roger Clemens and what impact he may have on the Yankees’ hopes of turning the season around. We ran the DMB simulation to produce likely outcomes, and ESPN featured the story on its home page on the day of the Rocket’s return!
You can find the article at http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2898563
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Welcome to the first edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2007. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
There has been a great amount of talk lately about Diamond Mind’s future. In case you missed it on the message boards, Tom Tippett addressed a number of your concerns last week. Following is a reprint of his initial post:
“Hi, everyone,
It's been quite a while since I've discussed what we've been working on, and I thought this would be a good time to jump in. I won't try to answer all of your questions with this one post, and I suspect you'll have some questions that I won't be able to answer at all, but I'll be on the forum for a couple of hours tonight and will do my best to answer as many questions as I can.
I've done a couple of chats since the Simnasium/DM deal took place last August, but I thought I'd do this as a forum thread this time so there'd be a permanent record for others who didn't participate in those chats and who don't happen to be here tonight.
Last August, I said that my goal was to get the 9b patch finished by the end of September, before we got buried by our busy season, which extends from early October to early April. Obviously, that didn't happen.
As I've said before, among the many reasons I thought the Simnasium/DM combination would be a win-win was the opportunity to hand off a lot of my management and administrative duties so I could focus a very high percentage of my time on product-related work.
The good news is that 95% of that transition is complete and I've been able to focus almost entirely on technical work for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, it took a lot more time to make that happen than I anticipated six months ago.
And you know what? I should have seen it coming and set my own expectations, and those of the DMB customers I was chatting with, at a more reasonable level.
Although each individual handoff went about as well as one could expect, the number of handoffs was large enough to chew up a lot of the time that I was planning to spend on the 9b patch and other improvements to the game. This should have been obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn't. I guess I'd been running the company for so long -- more than 19 years -- that I forgot how many things had to get done for everything to work.
As a result, we didn't get the 9b patch finished before the 2006 Season Disk took over as priority number one. As soon as the season disk was released, we got to work on two projects, the 9b patch and the 2007 Projection Disk.
I'm happy to report that the 2007 Projection Disk is almost done and will begin shipping on schedule (on March 9th). And I'm also happy to report that we're getting much closer to releasing the 9b patch.
I know that you expected the 9b patch to be done by now. So did I. But last month we chose to increase the scope of the 9b project in three ways. First, we decided to do some work on the computer manager that previously had been scheduled for version 10. Second, we discovered a couple of compatibility issues with the new Microsoft Vista operating system that we wanted to address in the 9b patch if at all possible. (Luke is making good progress on that front.)
Finally, Jack Wood has added a large amount of new text to the play-by-play library. His work was going to be one of the main features of version 10, but we decided to include everything he's done to date in the 9b patch instead. This is a major enhancement -- a 40-50% increase in the size of an already very large library -- that we will make available to version 9 owners at no charge.
Our near-term goals are very simple. Between now and the end of April, we want to get the 2007 Projection Disk out on time, get the 9b patch into field test, release the April update to the Projection Disk, and make the 9b patch available to all version 9 customers as soon as the field test has confirmed that it's ready.
We know there are other things you're interested in hearing about, but I'm going to stop at that for now. We need to deliver these things before we can move on the rest of our agenda, so that's our focus.
Before ending this initial post and waiting for your questions, I'd like to address one issue that has been raised by the Diamond Mind community over the past several months. The folks who run Simnasium have been accused of focusing all of their energy into the Total Baseball online game and ignoring the DMB product line.
As one of the people who is directly involved in these projects, I must disagree. Since early October, virtually all of my time has been spent on things that directly benefit the DMB community -- the 2006 Season Disk, the 2007 Projection Disk, and the bug fixes and enhancements that make up the 9b patch. We haven't done a very good job of communicating those facts in recent months, but that's the truth.
Tom"
If you purchase the 2007 Projection Disk prior to March 31st, you will receive two editions of the disk: the March 9th edition and a free update in early April that reflects the opening day rosters and events from the remainder of spring training. Orders placed after March 31st will include only the April edition.
After the first disk is issued, we'll create a few new players if some long shots make the opening day rosters, and we'll update the rosters and manager profiles to reflect late player moves. But we don't plan to make any changes that would affect the performance of players included in the March edition.
Place your orders now – order online at www.diamond-mind.com, via phone (800-400-4803) or fax (503-531-4006) or print a copy of the order form from the website and mail to the address on the order form.
We thought this would be a good forum to address some of the more common questions that Dayne has been asked lately as well:
What’s taking so long on the 9b patch?
As Tom described in his recent posts on the DMB Forum, it took a lot more time – especially Tom’s time – to hand off the business matters of Diamond Mind to Simnasium personnel than we anticipated. Once that was accomplished, Tom needed to work on the 2006 Season Disk to get that out on time. Since then, Tom has been working hard on the 2007 Projection Disk and, yes, the 9b patch. The 2007 Projection Disk is just about done and will ship on March 9th (yay!). The work on the 9b patch is continuing, mainly because we chose to increase the scope of that project to include improvements to the computer manager and the play-by-play commentary that were originally planned for version 10.
As many of you know, we've also encountered a couple of compatibility issues with Microsoft's recently-released Vista operating system. We'd like to be able to address those issues in the 9b patch if at all possible, so we're taking some time to diagnose those problems. Luke has determined some fixes needed and has started testing them.
OK, so when are we getting it?
We understand that you’ve been waiting for the 9b patch and are working to get it out as soon as possible. We have begun internal testing, and our hope is that we can begin field testing by the first week in April and then release it to customers shortly thereafter. The plan is to release the fixes and enhancements that are already in place as quickly as we can. If any additional work is needed after that, we'll release a 9c patch later in the year.
Since you’ve had to wait on the 9b patch, we’d like to show our appreciation for your patience by including the enhancements to the computer manager and the play-by-play library in the 9b patch. Those enhancements were originally planned for version 10, but we have decided to include all of that work in the 9b patch. This is a major enhancement -- a 40-50% increase in the size of an already very large library -- that version 9 owners will receive at no charge.
Is DMB taking a back seat to Simnasium’s Total Baseball?
I can understand why some may have that impression, but that’s not the case. For one thing, we’ve had some limitations due to the fact that no one other than Tom and Luke is capable of working on DMB code at this time. We’re trying to change that. We thought about recruiting a new programmer to work on DMB, but Luke is more familiar than anyone else and fully capable…who would be better? The limitation in the past is simply his time – he is needed on tech support. So, we’re looking to find some help for Luke on tech support. We’d like to find some people in the community willing to volunteer to do “light stuff” and some contractors to help on more difficult things. Luke will be posting job descriptions and leading that search.
You should also know that since the acquisition, practically all the work Tom has done on Simnasium’s game was also applicable for the 9b patch.
Then why does STB get frequent upgrades while we DMB customers wait and wait?
That’s a fair question, due to the frequency of upgrades at STB, but it’s really an apples vs. oranges sort of thing. Just about every STB upgrade over the past 6 months has been something that our web programmers can do on their own, such as web functionality or game adjustments, while DMB requires different programming skills and Tom’s expertise. In fact, most of the recent upgrades to the online game involved implementation of functionality that already exists in DMB but had not yet been implemented on STB.
Further, there are fewer compatibility issues with an internet application, and testing is much easier and faster. Some of that testing is also benefiting DMB. As a result, we can push upgrades and fixes more frequently on the web side. That’s true of software applications in general – web apps can be upgraded on a frequent basis, but PC apps require new versions. So, it’s normal for web upgrades to be smaller but more frequent, while PC software upgrades tend to be less frequent but much more substantial.
What is the situation regarding Vista?
We heard rumors early on about some of the Vista issues, so we made it a priority as soon as some of you reported problems. Since then, one of Luke’s primary tasks has been working on Vista to see what issues arise with DMB. As noted above, he has determined some fixes needed and will be starting the testing soon with the objective of including those in the 9b patch.
If you are having issues with Vista, please contact Luke (support@diamond-mind.com) describing the behavior. It would really help if you're able to capture a screen image to include. A way to do this is… while holding down the Alt key on your keyboard, press the Print Screen button. If you're unable to paste it into an email, you should be able to paste it into a Word document which you would attach to the email.
What happened to the DMB ad in Sports Weekly? Are you no longer marketing DMB?
Some have noticed that we did not run the usual DMB ad in Sports Weekly recently and have even speculated that this means we are not supporting Diamond Mind. To the contrary, we are exploring how to market DMB (as well as Total Baseball) more effectively. As part of that effort, we wanted to test the effectiveness of those ads, so we stopped them for a couple of months. If you check the most recent edition of Sports Weekly, you will see that we are now trying larger ads and some different ad copy . (And the ads are the same size as the Simnasium ads, so there’s no “backseat” there!) We are also placing additional ads in the Sports Weekly special edition for fantasy baseball and have done some articles with ESPN.com. The net result is, we hope, better marketing for DMB.
What’s in store for the future? When will we see version 10?
Our immediate goals are to release the 2007 Projection Disk, the 9b patch, and the April update to the Projection Disk. After that, we'll get back to work on version 10.
We also want to increase our capacity to develop new features for DMB at a faster pace. One way to do that is to add to our technical support staff so Luke has a lot more time to work with Tom on product development, as mentioned above. If you would be interested in volunteering to help out on simpler issues or a contractor job for technical support, please review the qualifications that Luke will be posting and, if you qualify, send your resume to Luke at support@diamond-mind.com.
Why have we not heard more from you?
Well, that’s a good question. First, I never saw the communication as lacking, I guess. It’s only been a few months since we did the chat, and Luke’s here daily and keeps me informed of what’s going on. There were also some strong emotions and concerns surrounding the acquisition, so we thought it might be better to let things settle down a little bit and deliver. So, we were determined to make sure the season and projections disks shipped on schedule and to get the 9b patch out as soon as possible. Since you’ve had to wait so long for the 9b patch, it will include play-by-play upgrades free of charge that were intended for version 10, as described above. We didn’t want to announce a schedule until we could feel confident as to when we could get that done.
Also, I sort of felt like I’d be intruding on Tom and Luke’s space. You all have built up a relationship with them over the years, and I felt like an outsider. None of that is an excuse, and I now realize we should have been more communicative here and will be from now on.
I’m looking forward to building a strong relationship with you in my own right!
]]>October 31 , 2006
Welcome to the fifth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2006. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
Topics for this issue:
October Mailing
2006 Season Disk
Upgraded Products for 2006
Simnasium Offers for Diamond Mind Owners
2007 Bill James Handbook
DMB in the Media by Tom Tippett
Tech Tips from Luke Kraemer
To Bunt or Not to Bunt by Tom Tippett
Although a majority of our customers now order their Diamond Mind products through our web store, a good number prefer to order by mail.
So we've begun sending our annual October mailing to registered owners of Diamond Mind Baseball. That mailing includes an updated order form that includes the 2006 Season Disk and the 2007 Bill James Handbook.
To order by mail without waiting for your letter, you can print an order form via the "How to Order" page of our web site.Work is underway on the 2006 Season Disk, which will begin shipping around December 14th, and we are now taking advance orders.
As usual, you'll receive a ton of information with this season disk, including everything you need to start playing games immediately upon installation:
- full rosters with every player who appeared in the big leagues
- official batting, pitching and fielding statistics, including left/right splits for all batters and pitchers and modern statistics such as inherited runners, holds, blown saves, pickoffs, stolen bases versus pitchers and catchers, and in-play batting averages
- games started by position versus left- and right-handed pitchers
- updated park factors
- a full set of real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups for season replays
- two schedules, the original (as-scheduled) schedule and another (as-played) reflecting rainouts and other rescheduled games.
- real-life salaries for all players
- complete manager profiles for all teams
You can place a credit card order now through our web store (follow the link from www.diamond-mind.com) or by calling us at 800-400-4803 during business hours (9-5 Pacific time, Mon-Fri). The 2006 Season Disk is priced at $29.95.We know that, at this time of year, many customers are putting together their Holiday Wish Lists. To help with that, here are the products we upgraded this year:
In August, we released a major upgraded, version of one of our most popular products – the All-Time Greatest Players disk. We've added more than 630 new players, bringing the total to 1760. In the original 2003 edition, we didn't include anyone whose career fell mostly before 1894, but the 2006 edition includes stars from the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.
We've also updated the stats and ratings for players who were active from 2003 to 2005 and relaxed the thresholds for earning a rating at a defensive position, so you'll see some existing players with an extra position or two.
The larger player pool allowed us to expand the number of teams from 32 to 48. We were able to create standalone teams for Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Los Angeles (A), Baltimore, Oakland, and San Francisco.
Because of the new players and teams, we developed new manager profiles for every team, added ratings for 16 historical parks (all of which have images available for free download from our web site), updated the ratings for modern parks to reflect the 2003-2005 seasons, organized the teams into two leagues with four divisions, and created two new league schedules.
Even though this version is bigger and better than the 2003 edition, we're holding the price for new customers at $29.95. Registered owners of the 2003 edition can upgrade to the 2006 edition for $17.95.
Upgraded Classic Seasons – In 2006, we added real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups to three more Classic Seasons: 1954, 1961 and 1973. This brings the total number of upgraded Classic Seasons to twelve – 1934, 1946, 1954, 1955, 1961, 1965, 1966, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977. These seasons are priced at $19.95 each.Many of our registered Diamond Mind owners have already taken advantage of the offer of a free team credit to try Simnasium’s Total Baseball. Total Baseball uses Diamond Mind technology and allows you to scout and choose from among thousands of players from baseball's glorious past, then test your ability to draft and manage a team of historical players through 162 games, competing against 11 other team owners in the race to the pennant.
Now is a great time to add an online baseball experience to your baseball simulation play (obsession may be closer to the truth for some of you). It’s easy to try Simnasium – if you have not played Total Baseball before, get a free team credit by sending an email to info@diamond-mind.com with the subject line “DMB free team offer” and your name in the body of the message. Once you have registered on the Simnasium site (www.simnasium.com) and created a user-id, you will receive the free team credit.
For those of you who have received your free team and want to build a baseball empire, you can claim a 2 nd team credit with the purchase of one team. Send an email to support@simnasium.com or info@diamond-mind.com with the subject line “DMB 2-for-1 offer” after you have purchased a team from Simnasium. One team is only $19.95.
Interested in setting up a custom league and testing your managing abilities against your friends’ abilities? As a registered owner of Simnasium, you can earn free team credits for yourself and your friends with our referral discount. When you refer a friend to Simnasium, he or she will receive a free team credit to try the game. When your friend purchases a team, you will receive a free team credit.Since 1990, the annual Bill James Handbooks have formed the backbone of our baseball library. For a complete, well-organized reference that includes every active player, you won't find a better book.
You can order the paperback edition from Diamond Mind for only $19.95, two dollars off the cover price. The spiral-bound edition, which lies flat on your desk, is $24.95. We are taking advance orders now and both editions will begin shipping the week of November 6th.
Among the many great features of the Bill James Handbook are:
- career registers for every active player, including minor-league stats for players with little big-league experience
- complete fielding statistics for every player
- expanded pitcher stats include hitting, fielding, and holding runners
- park factors and rankings
- left/right splits for all batters and pitchers
- conventional and sabermetric leader boards
- team standings, augmented by many team performance splits
- team rankings for batting, pitching and fielding
NOTE: Because of the added weight, first-class and air mail shipping rates are not available for orders including this book. Priority Mail and Overnight shipping rates are available.In recent weeks, we were asked by two major media entities to simulate portions of the 2006 postseason before they happened.
The first request came from Jonah Keri, a contributor to ESPN.com and the YES Network web site, who was writing a story about the Yankees postseason chances for the YES Network.
At the time we were contacted, Detroit had the lead and the tie-breaker going into the final weekend, so we expected the pairings to be Minnesota-New York and Oakland-Detroit. Instead, that final weekend saw Minnesota rally to win the division when Detroit was swept by the lowly Royals.
So it was that Minnesota hosted Oakland and Detroit went on the road to New York in the division series. Our simulation results made the two home teams the clear favorites, but as we know now, the underdogs came out victorious in both encounters. In fact, the favorites won only one game between them.
This is one of the reasons I always have mixed feelings when we're asked to predict a playoff series. On the one hand, it's very satisfying when a major television network, web site or newspaper comes to us. That means we've achieved a certain level of competence and trust over the years.
On the other hand, anything can happen in a short series.
Let's suppose that we were given an opportunity to talk to the baseball gods, just for a moment, and the gods told us that team A had a 70% chance to beat team B in a seven-game series. Further, let's suppose that those gods oversee a world where the outcomes are not predetermined. In other words, the gods possess the perfect knowledge that the series has a 70% chance to go in favor of team A, but they don't possess the power to make it come out that way.
There's still a 30% chance that the weaker team will win the series. Three times out of ten, it will be team B that is coating their locker room with champagne spray a week later.
Of course, we're not gods, so the best we can do is rate the players accurately, simulate a series many times, and develop an informed estimate of the true winning probability for each team. And while we believe we know enough about baseball to come up with an estimate that is very close to the real thing, we'll never know for sure.
When the real-life series is played, it is played only once, so we never get to find out whether that one outcome is representative of what would happen if these teams contested the series a thousand times. And because this is the only real outcome that people can see, some will conclude that it was the "right" outcome and anyone who predicted anything else is an idiot.
Despite these mixed feelings, we quickly said yes when Allen St. John of the Wall Street Journal called three weeks ago to ask us to simulate the World Series. In addition to simulating the four potential matchups, he and his editors asked us to run several what-if scenarios involving talented players who in real life are unavailable due to injury. During this project, I spoke with Allen many times and found him to be very knowledgable about sabermetric matters.
Allen's story appeared in the By the Numbers column in the Weekend section on Friday, October 20, and it said lots of positive things about Diamond Mind Baseball and the methods we use to simulate games.
Unfortunately, Allen, or his editors, chose to lead with this paragraph:
"With the World Series set to begin in Detroit tomorrow evening, Tom Tippett knows something important. He knows who's going to win."
I was absolutely stunned when I read that. Anyone who knows me knows that I would never make such a claim. And anyone who listened to my phone conversations with Allen or read the emails we exchanged would know that it's the polar opposite of what I had been telling him. Over and over, I pointed out that the most interesting aspect of playoff simulations is the frequency with which the weaker team wins, and I sent him links to two articles I'd written on the subject.At one point, Allen called me to get a quote for the article. It was clear from the way he posed the question that he was setting me up to make a very strong claim in favor of the Tigers. When I told him that I felt like he was trying to put words in my mouth, he backed off a little, and I again talked about the chances for the underdog to pull off an upset.
In the end, Allen couldn't resist the temptation to sacrifice truth for a strong lead paragraph, so he made me appear to be a know-it-all who doesn't have a grasp of the underlying probabilities. That's so far from the truth that it would be laughable if not for the fact that lots of people who don't know me will read this article and think I actually said that.
As I write this, the Tigers are trailing the Cardinals two games to one. Maybe they'll rally, maybe they won't. But if the Cardinals win it all, I won't be stunned. Even though we believe the Tigers are the superior team, St. Louis was able to take them in a seven-game series in 30% of our simulations. That's the real story here.If you are an Internet league commissioner and just finishing your season using the 2005 player ratings, consider using the Migrate command (File menu) when you're ready to set up your league using the 2006 ratings. First you'll need to install the 2006 season disk using a meaningful league folder name. For example, if last year's league folder was named ABC2005, you might name the new one ABC2006. After the 2006 season is installed, go to the File menu and choose Migrate. Set the Source database to ABC2005 and the Target database to ABC2006. The ABC2006 database will then have the same league(s), teams, rosters, etc. as the 2005 one. Players not used in your 2005 database and new ones added to 2006 will be in the free agent pool.
Flash Drives: Gamers regularly ask what's the best way to play a season on two systems, typically a desktop at home and a laptop when on the road. In the past I'd recommend emailing backup files between the two systems or burning CDs. Both techniques work but they have their drawbacks. I have a new, preferred recommendation using a Flash Drive, also known as a Thumb Drive or Memory Stick. These drives are the size of a Bic lighter and can hold an incredible amount of data. The smallest I've seen holds 256MB of data, room for lots of DMB seasons. The lowest price I've seen for this capacity is only $10. I just saw a 2GB one in the paper for only $25 and a 4 GB one for $45! You can get Flash Drives with lots more space but they can run in the hundreds of dollars. A Flash Drive plugs into a system's USB port(s) which is typically on the front panel of your PC under the standard drive bays. Laptops could have their USB port(s) on the sides or the back. I believe all systems sold today come with at least one USB port. This is the same port you'd use for uploading pictures from a digital camera.
Typically after you plug in one of these drives, Windows will pop up a message and announce that a new drive has been detected. After a few seconds, ‘My Computer’ pops up showing the contents of the drive. You'll also be able to see what drive letter Windows has assigned to it. My system already has A:, C:, D:, and E: drives so my Flash Drive is assigned as an F:. You don't actually need ‘My Computer’ at this point so go ahead and close it.
Start up DMB. Go to the File menu and choose "Install season disk". Select a season to install such as AGT2. After you accept the license agreement, DMB will ask for a location for the database and a name. The location will default to "C:\dmb9".
To install the season on the Flash Drive, change the location to its drive designation, in my case, "F:" (without the quotes). You can stick with the default database name, in my case AGT2, or you can give it a different one. Click on OK and the season will load onto the Flash Drive. You can now play that season just like you would one on your hard drive.
To play this season on another system, either shut down DMB or switch to a different season database on your hard drive. It's now safe to remove the Flash Drive. Plug the Flash Drive into the USB port on the other system. Windows will announce there is a new drive, just like the first system, and ‘My Computer’ will pop up. You should see the season folder you just installed on the drive from the first system. While still in ‘My Computer’, note the drive letter designation assigned to the Flash Drive. Close ‘My Computer’ and start DMB. Since the season wasn't loaded on this system, you'll need to let DMB know where it is. Go to the File menu and choose "Add reference to existing database". Set "Drives" to the letter designation assigned to the Flash Drive. The contents of the drive will be displayed in the "Folders:" window. Double-click on the season folder to open it and then click on OK. After a few seconds, DMB will report that the database is added and is now the active one.
You can now play games with the season on the Flash Drive. Like the first system, when you want to remove the Flash Drive, first change DMB's active database or shut it down before you remove the drive. Plug the drive back into the first system. Make the season database on the Flash Drive the active one and the results of all the games played on the second system are there. After you initially install the season on one system and issue the Add Reference on the other one, all you'll have to do from that point on is plug in the drive and issue a "Change active database" command to play that season. If you want to autoplay a large block of games while automatically saving boxscores and game-by-game statistics, the games will run rather slowly compared to a season on a hard drive but should be acceptable.
If you'd prefer to play all the games for a season on a hard drive yet still be able to move it from system to system, install the season on the hard drives of both systems like you would normally. When you're ready to move the season to your other system, shut down DMB. Plug in the Flash Drive. After ‘My Computer’ pops up, navigate to your hard drive. Open the DMB9 folder. Copy the season folder and Paste it to the Flash Drive. After the copy is complete, close ‘My Computer’ and unplug the drive. Plug the drive in the other system. When ‘My Computer’ pops up, Copy the season folder and Paste it to the DMB9 folder on that system's hard drive. You'll be warned that the folder already exists and asked if you want to replace it. Choose "Yes to all" and after the copy is complete, the season will be identical to the one on the other system.
This technique has the advantage of faster autoplayed seasons plus, the Flash Drive and the other system will serve as backups. If you use the technique of playing all your games on the Flash Drive, you won't have to copy season folders back and forth to your hard drives. You should, none the less, make periodic backups of the season database folder on the Flash Drive in case you lose it or it goes bad. Even if you don't want to use the Flash Drive for use on multiple systems, it's great to use for season backups.
Last week, the Mets were two runs down entering the ninth inning of game seven of the NLCS, and the Cardinals put the game and the series in the hands of their young closer, Adam Wainwright.
Wainwright, a rookie, was a starting pitcher in the minors but had spent the entire season in the Cardinals bullpen, pitching mostly in the middle innings before taking over as the closer when Jason Isringhausen was lost to injury.
Looking a little shaky, Wainwright started the biggest inning of his life by giving up a pair of singles to the Mets #7 and #8 hitters, Jose Valentin and Endy Chavez, putting runners at first and second with nobody out.
Generally speaking, first-and-second with nobody out is the best bunt situation in the game. On average, it's worth the risk of a failed bunt to try to get two runners in scoring position with one out. When the pitcher is due to bat, as was the case in this game, bunting the runners over is a no-brainer. Or is it?
Faced with this decision, New York manager Willie Randolph went in a different direction, summoning Cliff Floyd to pinch hit for Aaron Heilman. Floyd struck out, the rally fizzled, the Cardinals went to the World Series, the Mets headed home, and Randolph was the target of a great deal of criticism for eschewing the bunt.
Few things in baseball produce more discussion than the bunt. Traditional baseball people, including legions of fans, are strong proponents of bunting in these "obvious" bunt situations. Meanwhile, much of the sabermetric community decries the bunt as a complete waste of a plate appearance in all but a few limited circumstances.
But this case provides an excellent opportunity to take a closer look.
The traditional method of evaluating this bunt versus swing away decision is to consult the run probability tables. By studying tens of thousands of innings from real-life games, one can determine the average number of runs scored and the probability of scoring at least N runs in any game situation.
That's how we concluded that the most attractive bunt situation is first-and-second with nobody out. The average number of runs and the probabilities of scoring one or two runs are improved by a successful sacrifice.
But those run probability tables are based on the average of a large number of innings, so they represent the most likely outcome when you have an average series of hitters facing an average pitcher in an average ballpark during an average era. Randolph wasn't dealing with an average situation. He was confronted with one very specific situation. Can we really use the long-term averages to help us make this decision?
No, we can't. We have to look at the skills of the bunter and the pinch hitter, the skills of the pitcher, and the effect of the ballpark and the era in which the game was played.
We're playing in a relatively high-offense era, which reduces the value of the bunt and raises the value of swinging away. But Shea Stadium is a good park for pitchers, so that tends to offset the era effect.
How about the skill of the bunter? Suppose Heilman had gone to the plate to lay down the sacrifice. In six professional seasons, Heilman has batted a grand total of 107 times, roughly half in the minors and half in the majors. He has been credited with 12 sacrifice bunts, 5 at the big-league level.
Those 5 successful sacrifices came in 10 tries. Four times, he fouled off one or more bunt attempts before the plate appearance was resolved on something other than a bunt. Six times, he got the ball in play, and five of those six moved the runner(s). His rates for getting the ball in play and advancing the runners are slightly below the league average, but it's fair to say that he's been an average bunter. Ten attempts are not enough to prove otherwise when his rates are fairly close to the norm.
More interesting is the fact that Heilman had not batted once in the 2006 season, and I can't imagine that Randolph would have asked Heilman to do something so crucial for the first time in more than year.
But let's not give up on the bunt option without considering the possibility of using another player to lay down the bunt. One obvious candidate would be Tom Glavine. He's been a very good to excellent bunter throughout his career, he's had plenty of practice, and he could be used without burning a position player.
Oddly enough, Glavine had failed (bunting into a force out) in his only previous bunt attempt in this series. Still, had Glavine been called upon, I believe he would have had a very good chance to succeed this time.
The chosen pinch hitter was Cliff Floyd. On paper, he was a very good choice, mainly because of how he matched up with Wainwright. In his brief big-league career, Wainwright has dominated right-handed batters (.185 average, .523 OPS) but has been hit hard by lefties (.301 average, .845 OPS). Floyd is a lefty who has hit righties very well. Overall, I'd say this matchup is very favorable to the swing-away case.
So far, we've identified the major factors in the decision, indicated that the bunt would be called for if all of those factors were deemed to be near the long-term averages, and identified which factors favor the bunt and which favor swinging away. But we haven't tried to quantify the impact of each of these factors.
Fortunately, we have a tool that enables us to do exactly that. I call it our lineup-dependent expected runs calculator. With this tool, we can create a specific game situation -- a certain batting lineup against a certain pitcher in a certain park in a certain era with a certain set of baserunners and a certain number of outs -- and calculate the average number of runs that can be expected to score in that inning along with the probabilities of scoring at least one or two runs.
This tool allows us to find out when a specific situation differs enough from the long-term averages to point to a different conclusion. In this case, it supports Randolph's decision to use Floyd as a pinch hitter.
If we assume the bunt was attempted and was successful, Jose Reyes would have stepped to the plate with runners on second and third and one out. From that point, the Mets would have a 43% chance to score at least two runs in the inning, which is what they needed to prolong the game.
If the bunt was attempted but was not successful, Reyes would have seen runners at first and second with one out. Getting no runner advancement in return for that out would have reduced the two-run probability to 31%.
With Floyd swinging away against Wainwright, the two-run probability rises to 49%, which is even better than the successful bunt scenario. In other words, even if the bunt was guaranteed to succeed, it would still be better to swing away. Furthermore, swinging away rather than giving up an out makes it more likely that you'll get the third run that wins the game right here, right now.
What we don't know, of course, is whether Floyd was capable of performing at his normal level. Because of a foot injury, he had been in and out of the lineup, mostly out, and may have been a shell of his former self.
At the same time, we don't know whether Wainwright was capable of performing at his normal level. He was a rookie in a huge situation who had just let two of the enemy's weaker hitters to reach base. Maybe nerves would get the better of him. If I'm Randolph, I don't want to give the kid an easy out.
And we don't know whether nerves or the wet weather would have caused the defense to botch the bunt and leave the bases full with nobody out. That would have pushed the two-run probability to 66%.
While those uncertainties mean that we cannot know for sure, I believe Randolph made the right choice, and I'm glad to have this opportunity to give him a little support at a time when many others are being critical.
My other goal with this little bit of analysis was to point out how complicated these decisions can be. Randolph had very little time to make the call and a lot of factors to consider.
Just because it didn't work out this time, it doesn't mean he made a bad decision. I would criticize his move only if it turned out that he had good reason to believe that Floyd's injury had sapped much of his hitting ability, and since I wasn't there and didn't have access to the people involved, I can't say anything about that.]]>August 17 , 2006
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2006. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
Topics for this issue:
Bigger and better
A message from Simnasium CEO Dayne Myers
All-time Greatest Players Disk now shipping
Diamond Mind in the media
Who's the Senior Circuit now?
In the pipeline
I'm very happy to report that we have taken an important step to put ourselves in position to develop new features and products that were beyond our reach not too long ago.
A few weeks ago, we accepted an offer to merge Diamond Mind into Simnasium, the company that recently launched an exciting new online game around our simulation engine and our methods for rating players. The merger process was completed earlier this week, and Diamond Mind is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Simnasium.
What does this mean for the future?
In most respects, your experience with Diamond Mind won't change a bit. I will continue to be deeply involved in product development, player ratings and the other work I've always done. All of the Diamond Mind people (Luke Kraemer, Pat Morgan, and Jim Wheeler) are still here and every bit as committed to the Diamond Mind community as they've always been. As a team, we will continue to support and improve the game, we will continue to release new season disks, and we will continue to do the kind of baseball research that has set us apart from other game companies over the years.
In fact, if we had decided to keep this news to ourselves, there's a very good chance that nobody would notice that anything had changed. Our 800 number isn't changing. Pat will still answer the phone when you call. Luke and Jim will still answer your technical questions via email and the DMB forum. Our web site isn't going anywhere. Our 2006 Season Disk will be released at the usual time. And so on.
But we don't want to keep this to ourselves because we believe it is very good news for anyone who wants to see Diamond Mind's products reach their full potential.
In the past few years, as I've thought about where Diamond Mind needs to go and as I've watched various technologies evolve, I've come to realize that we couldn't get there from here by ourselves. We needed a new approach that allowed us to preserve all that's good about Diamond Mind while opening the doors to new opportunities.
With the addition of Simnasium's resources and people to Diamond Mind's existing capabilities, I believe we can enrich the gaming experience in new ways and do so more quickly than we could on our own.
Simnasium is based in Silicon Valley, which means they have ready access to people and companies that have mastered new technologies and platforms that we would be learning from scratch. And they have the financial and management resources to tackle projects that would be too large or too risky for a small company like ours.
As a result of this pooling of resources, the time I've been spending on the mundane administrative tasks that come with owning a business will be freed up for research and technical work.
I've been working with Dayne Myers, Simnasium's founder and CEO, for more than a year, and it was clear from the first time we talked that he had the same passion for baseball and the same commitment to customer service that have been cornerstones of Diamond Mind's approach from the beginning. As a result, I feel very comfortable teaming up with Dayne and his staff as we go forward.
As we make this transition, I've been reflecting on the major milestones in our history. The first commercial version of our game went on the market in 1987. In 1992, I quit my day job and started doing baseball work full time. In 1995, we ended our marketing relationship with Pursue the Pennant and started Diamond Mind. We added pitch-by-pitch in 1997, made the move to Windows in 2000, and added NetPlay in 2004.
Each of those milestones ushered in a new era for our game and the community of gamers who enjoy it. In the years ahead, I believe we'll look back on 2006 as the year of another important and successful transition, one that enabled us to leverage our skills with the resources of a passionate and compatible partner.
If you have questions, feel free to email us or post them on the Diamond Mind forum. We may not be able to answer all of them, but we'll do our best to respond to any concerns you may have and to share our thoughts about the future.
Greetings,
I want to take this opportunity to introduce Simnasium and myself to each of you and talk a bit about why we did this and where we're going. Some of you are already playing our Total Baseball game, which is powered by Diamond Mind.
As a long-time player of Diamond Mind and related online games, I can't overstate how much I love playing this game, a feeling shared by the rest of the Simnasium team.
Last year, as Tom and I began discussing my vision for Simnasium and what we'd like to do with Diamond Mind, my appreciation for the greatness of the game grew even more. Since then, the partnership between the two companies worked so well that it became apparent that we could do even more for both the Diamond Mind Baseball game and Simnasium Total Baseball by forging a closer relationship.
Among other things, by freeing Tom Tippett from managing the business side of things, we'd be able to turn him loose on enhancements to the game. After all, what's a better use of Tom's time -- accounting and marketing, or creating new features, versions, and player ratings for Diamond Mind, and thus by extension for Total Baseball?
For those of you who might be concerned about the future of Diamond Mind's PC-based game, I can tell you that the PC game is an essential part of our business. It powers Simnasium's current game and future versions that are already in development.
As a subsidiary of Simnasium, Diamond Mind will continue to produce, support and market the Diamond Mind Baseball game and related season disks. In many ways, the PC and online games are inseparable, and improvements will be added to both going forward. We can't guarantee that every enhancement will be added to every product, because some things make more sense in one environment or the other, but both product lines will benefit in their own ways.
The new All-time Greatest Players disk is the first example of the benefits of the Simnasium-Diamond Mind partnership. Although most of the player ratings work was done by Diamond Mind, Simnasium's online game provided the impetus to add a much larger number of players than we had originally planned, and their baseball staff made important contributions to the ratings process.
As an illustration about how passionate we are about Diamond Mind, I'd like to relate a story. (I'll avoid getting into details about how many hours we've spent playing –- that's embarrassing!)
When we were incorporating Diamond Mind's play-by-play commentary into Simnasium Total Baseball, I was "watching" a game. I had Don Drysdale working on a 2-0 shutout in a duel with Tom Seaver. Don got himself into a jam, runners on the corners with no out. He had just about worked his way out of it with a pop up and a strikeout and Seaver coming up to bat. "Whew!", I thought, "we're going to get out of this." Then came ...
The 1-1 pitch
Seaver hits a drive
deep to left
Goslin is at the wall
he looks up
it's GONE!
Seaver with a 3-run homer
His 3rd home run of the year!
"NO WAY!!!" I screamed and jumped out of my chair. That's crazy! I was about to call Tom and complain, but I calmed down and looked up Seaver's real-life stats. When I saw that he hit 12 dingers in his career and twice hit 3 homers in a season, I sat back in my chair and thought, "Those Diamond Mind guys sure know their stuff. Man, I love this game!"
That's the way we all are here at Simnasium ... life-long baseball nuts who love Diamond Mind and baseball in general. We want to see the game grow and improve, and we think joining forces is the best way to do that for both the PC and online versions.
Your input will always be welcome –- as Simnasium's customers can attest, we share Diamond Mind's belief that customer feedback matters and that you are our best source of ideas and improvements. We look forward to continuing that tradition. This is not just a business to us, it's a labor of love.
Three weeks ago, we began shipping the 2006 edition of the All-time Greatest Players Disk. The first edition, which was released in 2003, was one of our most popular products ever, and one of the most fun for us to work on. This one is even better in many ways.
We've added more than 630 new players, bringing the total to 1760. Last time around, we didn't include anyone whose career fell mostly before 1894, but the 2006 edition includes stars from the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.
We've also updated the stats and ratings for players who were active from 2003 to 2005 and relaxed the thresholds for earning a rating at a defensive position, so you'll see some existing players with an extra position or two.
The larger player pool allowed us to expand the number of teams from 32 to 48. But even more important than the number of teams is the identity of those teams.
In 2003, we were forced to combine certain franchises that did not have enough players to make an entire team. This time, we were able to create standalone teams for Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Los Angeles (A), Baltimore, Oakland, and San Francisco.
Because of the new players and teams, we developed new manager profiles for every team, added ratings for 16 historical parks (all of which have images available for free download from our web site), updated the ratings for modern parks to reflect the 2003-2005 seasons, organized the teams into two leagues with four divisions, and created two new league schedules.
Even though this version is bigger and better than the 2003 edition, we're holding the price for new customers at $29.95. Registered owners of the 2003 edition can upgrade to the 2006 edition for $17.95.
We've had a longstanding policy of offering free upgrades to people who buy a product in the six months before a related upgrade is released, so anyone who bought the 2003 edition from us after January 1, 2006, can contact us to request a free upgrade.
NOTE: If you've already purchased your copy of the 2006 edition of the AGP disk, please visit our web site to download a patch that corrects a small number of error and passed ball ratings that were incorrectly set. We have corrected our master copy of this product, so new customers will receive the corrected version.
During the all-star break, ESPN.com published an article by Rob Neyer that put forward an all-time all-star team for each league along with Rob's reasons for choosing those players. ESPN asked us to simulate an all-star game between those two teams, using Rob's selections as the starters and filling out the benches and bullpens with his honorable mentions. That simulated all-star game was featured on ESPN.com on Monday, July 10th.
On July 20th, the New England Sports Network (NESN) aired a show called "What IF..." that was based around a Diamond Mind simulation of game seven of the 2003 series between New York and Boston. You might recall that as the game in which Boston manager Grady Little chose to leave a tiring Pedro Martinez on the mound to protect a two-run lead in the bottom of the eighth inning.
In real-life, of course, New York rallied to tie the game before Aaron Boone won it in extra innings. Our task was to determine the most likely outcome in the event that Little had instead summoned Alan Embree from the bullpen to face Hideki Matsui.
NESN took our simulation results and crafted a highly-realistic game telecast using footage of other games between these two teams, commentary from the regular Red Sox announcers (Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy), new on-screen graphics, and a postgame show.
Over the years, we've done a bunch of simulation projects for major newspapers, magazines, web sites, and even a little television, but this was by far the most extensive involvement we've ever had in a television production. If you're interested, you can read more about it in an article on our web site called "Revisiting Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS".
Finally, in Dan Shaughnessy's August 10th Boston Globe column, he wrote about a visit to the home of John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox. Here's an excerpt in which Shaughnessy describes Mr. Henry's involvement with our game:
"He tells me of his passion for Diamond Mind Baseball. It's a computer game enabling him to recreate entire seasons using precise mathematical probabilities based on real data. The game allows him to make wild substitutions. True fantasy. He can put Babe Ruth on the 1929 Red Sox and see what would have happened. He can put Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson on the Red Sox of the 1950s and see how that would have worked out. John plays entire seasons on Diamond Mind. He started with 1927 and is working his way forward."
At it happened, I grew up as a fan of the American League during the time when the National League was dominating the All-Star games and was generally regarded as the stronger league.
It wasn't until later that I heard the terms Senior Circuit and Junior Circuit used in reference to the NL and AL, respectively. The Senior-Junior thing makes perfect sense given that the NL is 25 years older than its counterpart. But the terms also seemed to imply a certain superiority, not just seniority, for the NLers.
Two or three winters ago, we noticed that a significant amount of talent was shifting from the NL to the AL via trades and free agency. (I seem to recall writing about that, but I can't find it just now.) The next year, the talent flow seemed more balanced, but last winter saw another influx of talent to the AL.
During the work on the 2006 projections, we began to understand that the AL was becoming a noticeably stronger league than the NL, but we weren't yet at the point of being able to quantify that in any meaningful way.
That changed when a Diamond Mind customer asked us for advice with a little what-if scenario he wanted to run. He was wondering how the Cardinals would do in the AL Central and how the Royals would do in the NL Central if they changed places.
In addition to telling him how to set up that scenario using our 2006 Projection Disk, we decided to run some experiments of our own, and boy were we surprised!
We started by simulating the season 10 times with the customer's scenario, and lo and behold, the Cardinals struggled to an 83-79 record and a third-place finish in the AL Central. This was compared to a 95-67 record in our pre-season simulations using the real schedule. Meanwhile, a very bad KC team rose from a 62-100 record in the AL to a more respectable 74-88 in the NL.
Could the leagues really be that much different?
To learn more, we repeated the experiment with the other two divisions. When we swapped Boston with Philadelphia, the Red Sox ran away with the NL East while the Phillies struggled to stay ahead of Baltimore. When we had the Los Angeles teams trade places, the Angels won the NL West and the Dodgers finished last in the AL West.
The three experiments produced a swing of ten to twelve games in favor of the AL team that was moving to the other league. Ten games is a very big deal, so we immediately began to wonder whether that was a credible result.
This doesn't help us quantify things, but it's worth noting that the AL has dominated the two most talked about forms of inter-league play in the last decade, winning all but one all-star game (with one tie) and seven of the last ten World Series titles, including back-to-back sweeps in 2004 and 2005.
Of greater interest is the recent history of regular-season inter-league play. In 2004, the American League was 2 games over .500 against the NL. In 2005, it was 20 games over .500 against the NL. And in our 2006 simulations, that figure grew to 26 games. In other words, the clues were there, we just didn't pick up on them.
What does it mean for the AL to be 26 games over .500 against the NL? Instead of posting an aggregate record of 126-126 in those contests, the AL would be 139-113. Each AL team would go from an expectation of 9 wins to an expectation of 9.93 wins in those 18 games.
At the time, a gain of .93 wins didn't seem like a big deal. But when you stop to think about it, it really is.
An AL team plays 144 games within the league and 18 games against the NL. Put that team into the NL and it would now play 144 games against NL teams and 18 against the AL. It would get 8 times as many chances to play NL teams, so that gain of .93 wins per 18 games would grow to 7.4 wins in 144 games. And they'd be facing the stronger AL teams less often.
All of a sudden, a ten-game swing seems plausible, and the numbers were right in front of our eyes from the moment we finished our 2006 pre-season simulations. We just didn't notice until someone else came up with the idea to move St. Louis into the AL.
At the time we ran those experiments, the 2006 inter-league schedule had yet to be played. A few months later, when the AL was dominating the NL en route to a 154-98 inter-league record, the media was all over the story. Now everybody's saying that all of the best teams are in the AL.
If the season ended today, the Twins and Red Sox would be out of the playoffs despite being on pace to win about 94 games, while the Reds would be in the playoffs with a record that projects to 84-78. That's partly a function of parity in the NL, but it also reflects the fact that a bunch of wins migrated from the NL to the AL during inter-league play.
The actual 2006 inter-league results suggest an even larger difference between the leagues than our simulation results. That could be real or it could be a small-sample exaggeration. But if you take those results and combine them with 2004 and 2005 inter-league results, our pre-season simulations, our experiments, the AL's all-star game streak, and the fact that the NL hasn't won a World Series game since 2003, it's not a stretch to say that the AL is 10-12 games better right now.
How did that happen? A long time ago, Bill James wrote that teams that feel the need to get better will take steps to do so, while teams that don't will be complacent.
In recent years, AL teams have known they need to get better in order to compete with the Yankees and Red Sox, and they've been willing to spend money and make other changes to do that. Meanwhile, NL teams have had success without breaking the bank, and the Braves continued to win even while cutting their payroll.
Will this continue, and for how long? That's a good question.
To the extent that talent is moving to the AL in return for money (via free-agent signings and salary-driven trades), this can continue until the big-market NL teams decide to match their AL counterparts dollar for dollar.
To the extent that mature talent is moving to the AL in return for great young prospects, the seeds for a future reversal may already be germinating in the NL farm systems.We've made progress on both the version 9b patch and version 10 in recent months, but we're not yet ready to release the patch and we're not ready to begin talking about version 10 in any detail.
We had hoped to have the 9b patch done by now, but that project lost some momentum while we finished work on the All-time Greatest Players Disk and while we went through the very time-consuming process of joining with Simnasium.
Now that we have released the AGP disk and completed the union with Simnasium, all of the obstacles have been removed, and our top priority is the 9b patch. When the last few bits of work are finished, we'll spend a reasonable period of time field testing the patch and then make it generally available through our web site.
If you wish to volunteer to help with the field testing, please email Luke at support@diamond-mind.com. Not knowing how many volunteers will step up, we can't be sure that we'll be able to accommodate everyone, but we'll be grateful for any help that is offered.]]>May 19 , 2006
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the third edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2006. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
2006 Projection Disk
Jim Wheeler
Diamond Mind on the web -- Simnasium Total Baseball
Diamond Mind on the web -- STATS Diamond Legends
STATS versus Simnasium
Tech tip -- hosting NetPlay games
In the pipeline
An early look at the 2006 season
The update to the 2006 Projection Disk began shipping a month ago. This update reflects various roster moves and injury reports that took place during March. A handful of new players were created when they surprised us by making their opening day rosters.
It's our biggest projection disk ever, with over 1800 players, including hundreds of top minor-league prospects who have a chance to make an impact, or at least get some big-league playing time for the first time, in 2006.
We are very happy to report that Jim Wheeler is joining the Diamond Mind staff as a full-time employee. Jim has never been an employee of our company, but he has been part of the Diamond Mind family for a very long time as one of the primary developers of our Classic Past Seasons collection.
With Jim on board, we will be able to tackle many projects that have been in our plans for some time. He'll begin by helping us finish off the new All-time Greatest Players Disk.
In addition, Jim will help us support the Simnasium and STATS games, support Diamond Mind customers, accelerate the process of updating our Classic Past Seasons, upgrade Classic seasons from the 1960s and 1970s to Deluxe status using the play-by-play data from Retrosheet, and create new Classic Past Seasons for 1901 through 1926.
These products won't materialize overnight, of course, but we're excited about the prospect of enhancing and adding to our past season collection in the coming months and years, and we're delighted to have Jim as a full-time member of our team.
Last month, a new company called Simnasium launched Total Baseball, an exciting new web-based simulation game built around Diamond Mind technology, and they're making a special introductory offer to Diamond Mind customers.
As the owner of a team in a Total Baseball league, you'll have the opportunity to draft players from a pool of over 3500 historical players; set up and manage your pitching rotation, bullpen, saved lineups, and depth charts; and coax your team through the season and into the postseason.
The games are simulated using a custom version of the Diamond Mind Baseball engine and player ratings created by Diamond Mind. A full range of game accounts (boxscores, game logs, and the play-by-play commentary) and statistical reports will keep you up to date on all the action.
Simnasium offers a wide variety of options for customizing leagues, such as choosing the salary cap, weekly revenue, league rules, era of play, and league settings.
All Diamond Mind customers will receive a special introductory offer of one free team credit to try Simnasium Total Baseball, a buy-one-get-one-free promotion, and a $10 credit toward the first purchase.
To claim your free team, go to www.simnasium.com and register with the user name of your choice, then email REFERRAL@simnasium.com with “Diamond Mind Offer” in the subject line and your new Simnasium user name in the text of the email. The Simnasium Support Team will credit your account with the free team. Later, if you choose to buy a team to take advantage of the other aspects of the offer, email the support team again.
This offer expires on June 30, 2006. To be eligible, you must be a registered owner of Diamond Mind Baseball. If you participated in the Simnasium Beta test or received a free team via another offer, you are not eligible for a free team, but you are still eligible for the other elements of this promotion.
Don't forget that you can also take advantage of Diamond Mind technology by playing Diamond Legends from STATS LLC.
Designed jointly by Bill James, STATS, and Diamond Mind, this game has been entertaining baseball fans since 1992. Since then, it has been updated several times with more players, new game features, an expanded web interface, and new league options.
You can draft from a pool of nearly 4000 players, set up your manager profiles and manipulate them as the season progresses, use your weekly revenue to upgrade your roster and position your team for the stretch drive, and stay up to date through an extensive set of statistical reports and game accounts. The games are simulated using a custom version of the Diamond Mind Baseball engine.
Standard and custom leagues are available, and STATS (www.stats.com) recently launched a new Head-to-Head Tournament option.
Someone is bound to ask us which is better, STATS Diamond Legends or Simnasium Total Baseball. That's your call. Either one could be best for you, depending on what you're looking for in a web-based simulation league. Both of these partners are important to us, and both will receive our full support.
The most common reason why some gamers are unable to host NetPlay games is that their computer connects to the internet through a router that has a firewall blocking NetPlay connections. Most routers are fairly easy to configure for NetPlay hosting by a feature typically called Port Forwarding. This allows Diamond Mind NetPlay messages to pass through the firewall while still blocking all other unwanted Internet traffic.
No two routers are alike when it comes to port forwarding. To learn how to configure your router, a great resource can be found at http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm, which has documentation on approximately 1,000 routers.
After you select your router, you will be presented a list of common Internet games and applications. Scroll down to the section labeled "D" and click on the entry for "Diamond Mind Baseball". That will bring up directions on how to configure your router for Diamond Mind NetPlay traffic.
If those directions aren't enough to get you going, feel free to contact us for support.
Regular readers of these newsletters have noticed that recent editions have included less talk about new products than usual. There's a reason for that, and I'd like to try to catch up on that now.
One of the biggest challenges faced by any small company is balancing the short run with the long run. There is always too much to do, and it's usually easiest to focus on what's right in front of your nose, which often means fighting fires and dealing with short-term issues.
Sometimes, however, it's important to take a step back and lay the foundation for the future. Last summer, we made the decision to shift some of our resources toward projects that won't produce immediate results but, we believe, will be in the best long-term interest of the Diamond Mind community.
We haven't been able to tell you about these initiatives because we've been subject to confidentiality agreements. With the release of the Simnasium Total Baseball game, we can now speak freely about that project, but there are others that will have to stay under wraps until the appropriate time.
A good deal of this work involves taking greater advantage of the internet. Our first step down that path was the relationship with STATS that led to the web-based Diamond Legends game in the 1990s. The second was the release of the NetPlay feature in version 9 that allows DMB owners to play head to head over the net. More recently, we have worked with Simnasium to help launch their new game and with STATS on improvements to Diamond Legends.
How has this affected the other projects we had been working on?
First, when we first decided to upgrade our All-time Greatest Players Disk, our goals were limited to adding a few new players and incorporating the two big-league seasons that had been completed since the first AGP disk was released. Later, customer feedback suggested that it would be better to take time to add roughly 200 more players.
Shortly after that decision was made, we began to work with Simnasium to develop career/peak-period ratings for thousands of players. Many of those players don't qualify as all-time-greats, but some do, and we chose to expand the scope of the AGP update once again.
As a result, the new AGP disk will include at least 600 new players, enough to take the number of teams from 32 to 48. With the ratings work behind us, we're now choosing the new players, organizing them into teams, and creating manager profiles. Our goal is to ship this product before the All-Star break, if not sooner.
Second, our work on the version 9b patch has been stretched out. We're not happy about that. Our hope was to get this done much sooner, and I take full responsibility for the delay. We've never stopped working on that project, and other members of the DMB team have done their part, but there are a few key things that I need to take care of before we're ready to start beta testing this update. We'll do our best to finish those things off very soon.
Third, although we haven't talked about the details, we have been doing a lot of work on version 10 of Diamond Mind Baseball. We know that some of you are looking for details on features and a projected ship date. We're not ready for that yet, but we do want to assure you that version 10 is very much in our plans and that we anticipate the addition of a couple of big ideas and a whole lot of smaller improvements across most areas of the product.
Finally, we have released a number of updated season disks in the past year. That work is ongoing and will only accelerate in the future. As we noted earlier in this newsletter, we now plan to add many new Classic Past Seasons and upgrade our existing past seasons at a more rapid rate.
I started this section by talking about the challenge of balancing the short-run and the long-run. Another challenge faced by all companies is finding the best way to serve a diverse community of customers.
In the Diamond Mind community, there are league members and solitaire players, fans of current seasons and past seasons, people who want us to develop dead ball era seasons and others who couldn't care less about that era, folks who love our projection disks and folks who only want to play with stats and ratings from completed seasons, and so on.
Unfortunately, we cannot do everything all at once without spending a lot more money than we take in, so we have to do our best to find a sustainable long-term plan that balances the short term and the long term and gives everyone at least some of what they want.
We wish we could tell you everything we're working on now, but we can't do that. We will, however, endeavor to keep you posted on everything we can talk about.
We're at the quarter pole in the 2006 season, and it seems like a good time to take a quick look at some predictions and how the real season is tracking against our projections.
As usual, we have compiled a database of predicted team standings, and it's always fun to see what people think before the season starts. Our database currently consists of 51 predictions -- 49 culled from newspapers, magazines, and web sites plus our own simulations and a consensus vote of SABR members.
In the AL East, the expected order of finish is NY-Bos-Tor-Bal-TB, with about 70% of the predictions having the Yankees in first, one brave soul (Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe) picking the Blue Jays, and everyone else picking the Red Sox over New York. Thirteen predictions have Toronto ahead of Boston, but most think the Jays haven't improved enough to crack the top two. Two people actually have Toronto in 4th, behind Baltimore. About 70% have the Orioles fourth, with the other 30% believing they'll finish behind Tampa Bay. Nobody has picked Tampa Bay to finish higher than fourth.
The AL Central predictions were split between the mainstream and the hard core sabermetric community. The mainstream loves the White Sox, while folks like us and Baseball Prospectus see the 2005 team as having overachieved and the 2006 squad as vulnerable. We were among a very small minority that saw the Twins as favorites because of what appeared to be a great pitching staff. Most had the Twins in third. Believe it or not, three people picked Detroit to finish last (behind the woeful Royals) while only one had them as high as second. The consensus of these 51 picks was Chi-Cle-Min-Det-KC.
The AL West consensus was Oak-LA-Tex-Sea, but it was a close call at the top. Oakland had almost twice as many first-place votes as LA, but four had the A's in third place and two even had them in the basement. A very small minority (including us) had Texas second, but most put them in third with Seattle in the cellar.
In the NL East, the Braves are the consensus pick to continue their division-winning streak, but the Mets got a lot of support, too. Again, there's a split between the mainstream, which won't pick anyone other than Atlanta until the Braves actually fail, and the sabermetric community, which seems to put more weight on the Braves' flaws. These predictions see an Atl-NY-Phi-Was-Flo finish, with the vast majority (but not everyone) picking the Marlins last and only one person (Jonah Keri of Baseball Prospectus) picking the Phillies to win the division.
The Cardinals came closest to being a unanimous pick to win their division, but still fell two votes short of perfection. Lindy's picked the Cubs first and St. Louis second, while Keith Woolner of Baseball Prospectus went with Milwaukee and Houston in the top two spots. The next three spots were closely bunched, with the Astros having a slight edge over the Brewers and the Cubs. The Reds were picked by a majority to finish last, but Pittsburgh got their share of last-place picks as well. As a result, this group sees a StL-Hou-Mil-Chi-Pit-Cin finish.
In the NL West, things seem to be wide open. Four of the five teams were picked to win the division by at least one prognosticator. The Rockies were picked last by most, fourth by most of the rest, third once, and second once. In fact, every team was picked in every spot at least once, with only the Dodgers (never picked last) and the Rockies (never picked first) as exceptions. Overall, the consensus is LA-SF-SD-Ari-Col.
Now that we know what people were thinking two months ago, let's take a look at how the season is unfolding so far. From this point on, we'll focus mainly on how the actual results (through May 14) have compared with our preseason simulations.
Scoring is up slightly. It was much higher in the first two weeks of the season but has been trending down since. At this point, scoring is up 2.8% versus our projections and 5.9% versus the average for the entire 2005 real-life season.
Roughly one-third of the teams have posted run margins very close to our projections, where very close means no more than a dozen runs, or slightly more than one win. For example, the Dodgers had scored 13 more runs and allowed 1 more run than expected, for a net gain of 12 runs.
Oddly, many of these teams have actual records that are above or below their projected records because they've diverged from their pythagorean marks. For example, Cleveland has scored 39 more runs than expected and allowed 42 more runs than expected, for a net loss of 3 runs. We projected a run margin of +91 for the season. After 38 games, we would expect them to be at +21 now. They're actually at +18, which would normally produce a 21-17 record through 38 games. But they're actually four games under .500, at 17-21, despite outscoring their opponents.
More than half the teams are within 3 games of the pace they set in our preseason simulations, and that fraction would rise to more than 2/3 if we included teams that fall outside that range only because of pythagorean variations. We'll take the rest of this space to focus on teams that have significantly over- or under-performed so far.
The Tigers are the big surprise. They've been better on both sides of the ball, but 80% of their gains have been in preventing runs. There's nothing special about the walk and strikeout rates of their pitchers, but balls in play have done very little damage. Homeruns allowed are down, and their defense is leading the league in turning batted balls into outs.
We were among those who were surprised when the White Sox ranked only fourth in the AL in runs allowed in our simulations. After all, they rode pitching and defense to a world title only a few months ago. To date, they're allowing runs at exactly the projected rate, but their offense has been 3-4 wins better than expected and they're an additional two wins ahead of their pythagorean record.
In the NL West, Arizona and Colorado are tracking well against our projected offensive numbers, but both teams have allowed about 30 fewer runs. The Giants have been about 25 runs worse on both sides of the ball.
The Cubs are the most disappointing team in baseball relative to our projections. That's partly because they've been without Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, and Derrek Lee. But that's not the entire story. Aramis Ramirez and Juan Pierre haven't been hitting, and nobody has stepped up to fill in for the missing players.
The next most disappointing team has been the Twins, who have been the mirror image of the Tigers. Both teams are slightly ahead on runs scored, but while the Tigers have allowed 49 fewer runs, the Twins have allowed 52 more. Traditionally a very good defensive team, Minnesota is last in the majors in turning batted balls into outs, but I don't think it's the defense. Their starting pitchers are walking more guys, getting fewer strikeouts, and allowing a lot more homers, so it stands to reason that they're also presenting their defense with a lot of very tough chances.
Wrapping up, Oakland, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh are each about two wins worse on both offense and defense.]]>March 17 , 2006
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the second edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2006. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
2006 Projection Disk
2006 Bill James Handbook
Updated Classic Past Seasons
Tech tip: Season Disk installation
2006 Hall of Fame voting
As scheduled, the 2006 Projection Disk, began shipping on March 9th in both version 8 and version 9 formats.
It's our biggest projection disk ever, with over 1800 players, including hundreds of top minor-league prospects who have a chance to make an impact, or at least get some big-league playing time for the first time, in 2006.
Anyone who buys the 2006 Projection Disk prior to March 31st will receive two editions of the disk -- the March 9th edition and a free update in early April that reflects the opening day rosters and events from the remainder of spring training. After March 31st, you'll receive only the April edition.
Between now and the April update, we'll create a few new players if some long shots make the opening day rosters, and we'll update the rosters and manager profiles to reflect late player moves. But we don't plan to make any changes that would affect the performance of players included in the March edition.
Don't forget to order your copy of the 2006 Bill James Handbook. The regular edition is only $17.95 and the convenient lays-flat-on-your-desk spiral-bound edition is just $21.95. Hardly a day goes by when we don't reach for the Handbook as part of our work.
Among the many great features are career registers for every active player, including minor-league stats for players with little big-league experience; complete 2005 fielding statistics; expanded pitcher stats that include hitting, fielding, and holding runners; park factors and rankings; left/right splits for all batters and pitchers; conventional and sabermetric leader boards; team standings, augmented by many team performance splits; and team rankings for batting, pitching and fielding.
NOTE: Because of the added weight, first-class and air mail shipping rates are not available for orders including this book. Priority Mail and Overnight shipping rates are available.
The 1954 and 1961 Classic Past Seasons have been updated to include real-life transactions and/or game-by-game lineups. These updated seasons are now shipping. A few other CPS updates are underway, and we'll have more details on the seasons involved and the release dates in the coming weeks.
Recently we've been receiving reports from a few gamers who are having trouble installing a season disk. They're getting the message:
Unable to decompress
In the past, problems like this have always been traced to rogue spyware that interferes with the DMB season disk installation process, and it may be that a new spyware program is causing these problems. Fortunately, there is an alternative installation procedure that will work with these files:
- Start DMB
- Go to the Transfer menu and choose "Create league database"
- Navigate to the folder where the season disk is saved
- On the Open window, second line from the bottom, set File Name to "*.alt" (without the quotes)
- Click on the Open button
- The selection window will display all sub-folders and season disk installation files
- Open the season disk file you want to install
- On Copy New Database window, set "Name of the new database" to the folder name you want to use for this season
- Click on OK
The procedure is the same for version 8 and version 9 of Diamond Mind Baseball. If it doesn't work, let us know.
As you know, Bruce Sutter was the only player elected in this year's Hall of Fame voting.
Meanwhile, folks in Boston were very disappointed when Jim Rice came up short again. Others, including Rich Gossage himself, were more than a little dismayed when Sutter got more votes than the Goose. And many in the baseball research community have been aggressively touting Bert Blyleven, but the voters weren't swayed.
Did Sutter deserve election? Did anyone else?
I don't claim to have any special ability to decide who belongs in the Hall and who doesn't. It's called the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Performance or the Hall of Statistics or the Hall of Good Guys.
There's always going to be room for subjectivity and differences of opinion when comparing players. How much weight should be put on peak performance versus longevity? What's the best way to compare players across eras? How do you handle changes in the game, such as the designated hitter and the increasing role of the bullpen?
And even if the baseball world could settle on a perfect method for evaluating performance across eras, there's still the question of where to draw the line between the ins and the outs. Even if we can all agree that A was 10% more valuable than B, does that mean both are in, both are out, or A is in and B is out?
Nevertheless, I'm going to wade in with a few observations about this year's slate of candidates.
We have a method for comparing performances across eras, one that we use for our All-time Greatest Players Disk. It's not the only way to evaluate players, of course, but it does have at least a couple of things going for it. All stats are park-adjusted, and all players are evaluated relative to their peers, so changes in eras are accounted for.
Our method rates players based on their best sequence of consecutive peak seasons. We don't always use entire careers because some of the best players in history arrived on the big stage at a very young age and stuck around for a long farewell at the end. Those extra seasons, which often pale by comparison with the player's peak years, can narrow the gap between the truly great and the nearly great.
For most players, the peak period consists of at least eight seasons, though it can vary depending on playing time. But our definition of a peak period is long enough to avoid overrating guys who had a great run of two or three years in an otherwise nondescript career.
Bruce Sutter was a dominant closer in his day, posting a career ERA of 2.83 in 1042 career innings, leading the league in saves five times, and averaging 4.7 outs per appearance. But is he the most deserving candidate?
Our method identifies the years from 1976 to 1984 as Sutter's peak period. That leaves out the three mediocre years he spent with the Braves at the end of his career. On a peak basis, he's among the best ever among those who are eligible, but he's not the best of the best.
In fact, adjusted for era and park, Sutter's peak ranks 10th in ERA and 7th in OPS among eligible relievers.
One of guys ahead of him is Rich Gossage, whose peak extended from 1977 to 1986, making him a contemporary of Sutter. Not only does Gossage have a higher peak value, he has longevity on his side, too. Sutter pitched only 152 innings after he turned 31, and wasn't very good during that part of his career. Meanwhile, Gossage pitched until he was 43 and had several good seasons after his age-31 campaign. As others have pointed out, it's hard to see why Sutter belongs in the Hall and Gossage does not.
And what about John Wetteland? Because he garnered only 4 votes this year, exactly 1/100th as many as Sutter, he'll be dropped from the ballot. Wetteland's peak runs from 1991 to 1999, and on that basis, he ranks as the #1 relief pitcher in relative ERA and #2 in relative OPS using our method.
He's well ahead of Sutter on both counts, and it's not hard to see why. Wetteland compiled a career ERA of 2.93, ten points higher than Sutter's, but Wetteland did much of his work in a DH league and all of it in the hitter-friendly 1990s. Wetteland saved more games and had a much better save percentage, too.
There is one big difference, however. Wetteland pitched in the era of relief specialists. As a result, he recorded only 3.7 outs per appearance in his career, and that includes 17 starts. Even with those starts, his career added up to 277 fewer innings than Sutter's. Is that a deal breaker for Wetteland? It appears that 396 voters feel that it is.
There's no question that shorter outings help a pitcher put up better rate stats. Our reliever rankings are dominated by modern pitchers such as Wetteland, Robb Nen, Tom Henke, Bryan Harvey, and Jeff Montgomery. In time, they'll be joined by today's dominant closers, including Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, Troy Percival, and Billy Wagner.
Very soon, the HOF voters are going to have to deal with this issue. How do you compare the workhorse relievers of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s with the specialists of the 1990s and 2000s?
So far, with the exception of Dennis Eckersley, who also had a meaningful career as a starter, it appears the voters are drawing a line between those eras. Older guys like Sutter, Hoyt Wilhelm, and Rollie Fingers are in, while more recent players like Wetteland, Henke, and Harvey aren't getting a sniff.
No matter how you look at it, Gossage deserves to be a member of any club that includes Sutter. In fact, even if you believe Sutter wasn't worthy, Gossage should be enshrined. And if you drawn the line so it includes Sutter, Dan Quisenberry has to be in as well, and you have to give serious thought to Sparky Lyle and Kent Tekulve.
The Jim Rice debate centers on peak value versus longevity. He was among the most feared hitters in the game through his age-33 season, but tailed off quickly and was done before he turned 37. If he'd put up another two or three seasons, even mediocre ones, he would have topped 400 homers, approached 3000 hits, and added to his impressive RBI total. That might have been enough.
But is it true that Rice was clearly qualified on a peak basis? Was it only the lack of a normal tail that has kept him out so far?
That's far from clear. According to our peak-period rankings, more than 30 left fielders rank ahead of Rice, mainly because his raw numbers were boosted by Fenway Park. After discounting his stats for the park, he's still very good, but he's not among the elite.
In fact, he ranks behind another player who barely survived the cut to remain on the ballot. Albert Belle ranks 8th among LFs in our method but was named by only 40 voters. Compared with Rice, Belle got more help from his era but less help from his home parks. Take both factors into account and Belle comes out ahead.
Neither Rice nor Belle was an asset in the field. Both were used at DH a fair amount of the time, more so for Rice than Belle. Neither was a great runner, but Belle had more stolen bases and a higher success rate. Neither had a great relationship with the press. Both saw their careers end early, Belle because of a degenerative hip condition, Rice because he stopped hitting.
On a rate basis, and focusing on peak performance, it's hard to see how Rice could be a borderline candidate for election while Belle is a borderline candidate to be dropped from the ballot. But longevity is clearly an important factor in HOF voting, and the voters appear to be discounting Belle because he had 2400 fewer atbats. Or maybe they're holding Belle's much-publicized fits of temper against him.
Dale Murphy is at least as good a candidate as Rice, though Murphy received only 56 votes to Rice's 337. Murphy's career was just as long. And he played center field, a more demanding defensive position. As a result, Murphy ranks higher among CFs than Rice does among LFs.
Among shortstops, Alan Trammell ranks even higher than Murphy does among center fielders, yet Trammell was listed on only 92 ballots. Maybe the voters are leery of electing any more shortstops with Derek Jeter, Miguel Tejada, Nomar Garciaparra (if he can resurrect his career), and Alex Rodriguez (if he doesn't become seen as a third baseman) on the horizon.
Much has been written about Bert Blyleven in recent years, most of it favorable. The sticking point appears to be his career 287-250 record, which makes him appear to be a .500 pitcher in the eyes of some people.
Blyleven was a terrific pitcher. On a peak-years basis, Blyleven is among the best ever, ranking 22nd in era/park-neutral ERA and 12th in OPS. He struck out more than 200 hitters in a season eight times, and is 5th on the all-time strikeout list.
And it's not as if he was a flash in the pan, either. He broke in as a 19-year-old in 1970 and pitched until he was 41. He's among the all-time leaders in wins, innings, strikeouts, and complete games. He won at least 15 games ten times.
But he never dominated. He posted only one 20-win season, and he rarely led the league in high-profile categories like wins (never), ERA (never), and strikeouts (once). He just did his job very well week after week, year after year.
Does that remind you of another right-handed pitcher who IS in the hall? How about Don Sutton? Sutton was a very good pitcher for a very long time, and his career numbers are similar to Blyleven's. Sutton pitched about 5% more innings, posted similar (but slightly weaker) walk and strikeout numbers, and lost even more games (256) than Blyleven.
Furthermore, Blyleven's stats are clearly better than Sutton's after adjusting for league and park. Sutton did his best work in pitcher's parks and a non-DH league. Blyleven did not have that luxury.
But Sutton is in the Hall and Blyleven is still on the outside looking in. Why is that? It's got to be the wins. Sutton surpassed the 300 mark (324) and Blyleven came up a little short. To me, that's not enough of a reason. Blyleven was better. If Sutton's worthy, so is Blyleven.
By the way, in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2006, Bill James also makes a compelling argument for Blyleven. Bill asked whether Blyleven somehow lacked the ability to win the close games. He looked at this question in several interesting ways, and concluded that Blyleven's teammates deserve much of the blame for failing to provide enough runs in a large number of games in which Blyleven pitched very well.
Jack Morris, author of that memorable 1991 World Series performance, had a peak period that fell short of both Blyleven (by a lot) and Sutton (by a little). Like the others, he was a very good pitcher for a long time without dominating the league at any point, though his career was more than 1000 innings shorter.
Maybe Morris is HOF-worthy, maybe he's not. But if he makes it some day, Blyleven should be there waiting for him.
As I said at the beginning, deciding where to draw the line is a matter of taste. Some 16,400 players have appeared in a major league game. How many are worthy of this honor? 200? 400? 800?
Your answer is as good as mine. But wherever you draw that line, it would be nice if the most-deserving players were allowed to cross it. All in all, I think the voters do a pretty good job, but there's room for improvement, to be sure.
]]>January 24, 2006
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the first edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2006. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
2006 Projection Disk
2006 Bill James Handbook
In the pipeline
Unlikely homeruns
We're now taking advance orders for the 2006 Projection Disk, which is scheduled to begin shipping on March 9th. It will include more than 1600 players and will be released in both version 8 and version 9 formats.
Anyone who buys the 2006 Projection Disk prior to March 31st will receive two editions of the disk -- the March 9th edition and a free update in early April that reflects the opening day rosters and events from the remainder of spring training. After March 31st, you'll receive only the April edition.
After the first disk is issued, we'll create a few new players if some long shots make the opening day rosters, and we'll update the rosters and manager profiles to reflect late player moves. But we don't plan to make any changes that would affect the performance of players included in the March edition.
Don't forget to order your copy of the 2006 Bill James Handbook. The regular edition is only $17.95 and the convenient lays-flat-on-your-desk spiral-bound edition is just $21.95. Hardly a day goes by when we don't reach for the Handbook as part of our work.
Among the many great features are career registers for every active player, including minor-league stats for players with little big-league experience; complete 2005 fielding statistics; expanded pitcher stats that include hitting, fielding, and holding runners; park factors and rankings; left/right splits for all batters and pitchers; conventional and sabermetric leader boards; team standings, augmented by many team performance splits; and team rankings for batting, pitching and fielding.
NOTE: Because of the added weight, first-class and air mail shipping rates are not available for orders including this book. Priority Mail and Overnight shipping rates are available.
Since the last newsletter, most of our time and energy has gone into the 2005 Season Disk and the 2006 Projection Disk, but we've also made a lot of progress on several other season disk projects.
The 1973 Classic Past Season has been updated to include real-life transactions and/or game-by-game lineups. We have a little more testing to do, but we expect this updated season to begin shipping by the end of January. Several other CPS updates are underway and should begin shipping next month. Details will be announced in a few weeks.
We've also made a lot of headway on our update to the All-time Greatest Players Disk. As we've noted in this space in the past, we're in the process of adding several hundred players to the disk and updating the ratings and stats to reflect the real-life seasons that have been completed since the first edition of the AGP was released.
Ask even the most casual baseball fan the question, "Who are the worst hitters in the game?", and they'll quickly respond, "Pitchers, of course."
The numbers bear that out. In 2005, pitchers batted .146 as a group, and they didn't exactly tear things up in categories other than batting average. They doubled only once every 47 atbats and needed almost 300 atbats per triple. They struck out more than ten times for every walk. When they made contact, they hit the ball on the ground far more often than did position players.
In the midst of this ineptitude, however, pitchers managed to bang out 21 homeruns. That's not an impressive rate, to be sure. It's only one every 269 atbats, a rate that is 88% below the norm for non-pitchers. But it's still 21 homers from the worst hitters in the game.
I can already hear the skeptics saying, "Yeah, but there are a handful of good-hitting pitchers out there, and maybe they account for most of those 21 homers." Maybe. Or maybe not.
One of them was hit by Mike Hampton, a very-good hitting pitcher who entered 2005 with 14 career homers in 639 atbats, though 10 of those were in his two seasons with the Rockies. Livan Hernandez, another good-hitting pitcher, clouted two homers in 2005 to push his career total to 7 in 564 atbats. Six other homers were notched by pitchers who came into the season with a career homerun rate that fell somewhere between the norm for position players and the norm for pitchers.
In other words, 9 of the 21 homers were hit by guys who had previously shown a bit more power than the average hitter. Greg Maddux hit one, too, giving him five for his career, though his previous rate of one every 333 atbats was actually below average for pitchers. The other 11 were chalked up by guys who had never hit one before.
Why are we writing about this now?
Because the topic that won't die has popped up on the DMB forum again. Every year or two, we find ourselves responding to someone who wonders why players who never homered in real life can sometimes hit one out in a DMB game.
The gamers who raise this question appear to believe that never means never. Their view is that if something never happened in a real-life season, it should not be allowed to happen in a simulation involving players from that season.
We disagree.
Reason number one is that it would change how you manage a game. If you were facing a hitter with no real-life homers, and you knew that we rate these players so that they have no chance of hitting one out, you could take advantage of that knowledge when choosing tactics. Real-life managers don't have that luxury. They know that a homerun is very unlikely but not impossible.
Reason number two is that just because something didn't happen in a particular season doesn't mean that it couldn't happen if that season was played over again.
Consider Scott Podsednik. In 568 plate appearances during the 2005 regular season, he had no homers and only one triple. On that basis, some gamers would say that we should rate Podsednik so that he could never hit a homer and have very little chance to triple. And, yet, in 49 postseason atbats Podsednik had 2 homers and 3 triples. If we had simulated the playoffs based on his 2005 regular season stats and a rating method that made it impossible for him to go over those numbers, what he actually did in real life would have been impossible in DMB.
And consider the pitchers we wrote about earlier. There were 229 pitchers who (a) had at least one atbat prior to 2005, (b) had never homered before 2005, and (c) had at least one atbat in 2005. These players combined for 15034 homerless atbats through 2004. In 2005, they hit 11 balls out of the park.
Those are real-life examples, but we can also construct a hypothetical scenario that illustrates this point.
Suppose you've got 100 position players who would normally be expected to hit 2 homers per season. And let's suppose that by chance, in one particular season, 20 of them don't hit any, 20 hit one, 20 hit two, 20 hit three, and 20 hit four. That's an average of 2 per player, just as you would expect.
Now suppose these 100 guys play another season with no changes in their innate ability or the conditions in which they play. By definition, all of them go into that second season with the expectation of hitting two homers. It doesn't matter that some are coming off a zero-homer season and others are coming off a four-homer campaign.
Chances are the 20 guys who hit zero the first year would hit a total of 40 the second year. Forty homers by guys who didn't hit any the season before might seem like a lot to some people, but by definition, it's right on the money for this population of players.
When a guy hits zero in real life, we can't tell whether he really had no chance to hit a homer or whether he had some chance but just didn't happen to hit any, perhaps because he was unlucky enough to hit his deepest balls in the most spacious parks or just didn't play enough to get that first one. We believe the latter is true far more often than the former.
Now suppose you had 100 guys rated to hit 20 homers each. Let's assume that in one particular season, 20 of them hit 18, 20 of them hit 19, and so on up to 22. Just like our pool of two-homer players, 20% of them come in two below the target, 20% come in two above the target.
Nobody would think twice about this. Nobody would look at a guy who hit 20 homers in real-life and be shocked if he hit 22 in a simulated season. So why should we be surprised when a guy with zero hits two in a replay?
Some of the least likely real-life homeruns occur when the situation is most favorable. Perhaps you've got a homer-prone pitcher on the mound and the wind is blowing out in a homer-friendly park. In fact, five of the pitchers who notched their first career homers in 2005 hit those bombs in Cincinnati or Arizona, two of the NL's top homerun parks.
On occasion, you're going to encounter favorable circumstances in your DMB games, too, and sometimes a guy is going to do something he's never done before. Maybe he always had it in him but just hadn't shown it yet, or maybe the situation was so favorable that he was able to do something he wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
That's why we decided to allow all players to have at least some chance of hitting a homer in DMB games, even if the probability is very low.
]]>October 27 , 2005
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2005. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
October mailing
2005 Season Disk
2006 Bill James Handbook
Updated 1975 Classic Past Season now shipping
DMB in the Philadelphia Daily News
DMB on ESPN.com
New web site articles
That's poker…and baseball
Although a majority of our customers now order their Diamond Mind products through our web store, a good number prefer to order by mail.
So we've begun sending our annual October mailing to registered owners of Diamond Mind Baseball. That mailing includes an updated order form that includes the 2005 Season Disk and the 2006 Bill James Handbook.
To order by mail without waiting for your letter, you can print an order form via the "How to Order" page of our web site.Work is underway on the 2005 Season Disk, which will begin shipping on December 14th, and we are now taking advance orders.
As usual, you'll receive a ton of information with this season disk, including everything you need to start playing games immediately upon installation:
- full rosters with every player who appeared in the big leagues
- official batting, pitching and fielding statistics, including left/right splits for all batters and pitchers and modern statistics such as inherited runners, holds, blown saves, pickoffs, stolen bases versus pitchers and catchers, and in-play batting averages
- games started by position versus left- and right-handed pitchers
- updated park factors
- a full set of real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups for season replays
- two schedules, the original (as-scheduled) schedule and another (as-played) reflecting rainouts and other rescheduled games.
- real-life salaries for all players
- complete manager profiles for all teams
You can place a credit card order now through our web store (follow the link from www.diamond-mind.com) or by calling us at 800-400-4803 during business hours (9-5 Pacific time, Mon-Fri).Since 1990, the annual Bill James Handbooks have formed the backbone of our baseball library. For a complete, well-organized reference that includes every active player, you won't find a better book.
You can order the paperback edition from Diamond Mind for only $17.95, a 10% discount off the cover price. The spiral-bound edition, which lies flat on your desk, is $21.95, a 12% discount off the cover price. Both editions will begin shipping the week of November 7th.
Among the many great features of the Bill James Handbook are:
- career registers for every active player, including minor-league stats for players with little big-league experience
- complete fielding statistics for every player
- expanded pitcher stats include hitting, fielding, and holding runners
- park factors and rankings
- left/right splits for all batters and pitchers
- conventional and sabermetric leader boards
- team standings, augmented by many team performance splits
- team rankings for batting, pitching and fielding
NOTE: Because of the added weight, first-class and air mail shipping rates are not available for orders including this book. Priority Mail and Overnight shipping rates are available.The 1975 Classic Past Season now includes real-life transactions and game-by-game starting lineups. This season can be purchased for $19.95 each. Registered owners of the previous editions can upgrade for $5, and free upgrades are available on request to anyone who bought this season in the past six months. This brings to nine the number of Classic seasons that now have transactions and lineups.
The Tuesday, October 4, edition of the Philadelphia Daily News included a brief story about the outcome of a hypothetical playoff game between the Astros and Phillies.
As you know, the NL wild card race came down to the final day, with Philadelphia trailing Houston by one game. Both teams won on Sunday, putting the Astros into the postseason tournament, but Philly fans wondered what might have happened if Sunday had gone their way.
We were happy to help, so we rated the players based on their 2005 stats and played the game one time. Philadelphia won 5-2, and while we all know that playing a game once doesn't prove which team is better, it's often more interesting to play the game once and report the boxscore and game log than it is to play the game a thousand times and report that team A won 551 of those games. Besides, the real-life playoff, had it been needed, would have been played only once.
Here's the link to the Daily News story ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/sports/baseball/10score.html
... and the link to the version on our web site ...http://www.diamond-mind.com/simulations/houphi2005.html
To view the story on the Daily News site, you may be asked to register with them. It's free, but it will take a couple of minutes to enter your name and address.
ESPN.com's World Series coverage included simulation results from Diamond Mind. We simulated the series 100 times, tallied the number of wins for each team, and providing ESPN with stats, boxscores, and play-by-play accounts of the most representative of those simulation runs.
We recently posted our annual ranking of the pre-season predictions and the stats of players who made their debuts in 2005.
For the past two years, the airwaves have been flooded with poker events and ads for online poker sites.
If you've watched any of those shows, you've undoubtedly heard that "all you can do is get your money in the pot with the best hand".
These words are usually spoken when a player makes a big bet when he has the advantage but loses the hand when his opponent catches a killer card at the end. They serve as a reminder that luck plays a major role in most poker hands.
The big bet wasn't a mistake at the time it was made, even if the hand is ultimately lost. If you can get the odds in your favor, and do so over and over again, you'll make a lot of money in the long run. As a result, in the long run -- when you've played thousands and thousands of hands, more than enough to even out all of the luck -- poker becomes a game of skill.
The most popular form of poker these days is no-limit Texas Hold'em. In Hold'em, the first round of betting is based on two hole cards that are dealt face down to each player. Then five community cards, which are shared by all of the players, are placed face up in the middle of the table. Not all at once, though. Three of them come first (the "flop"), then a fourth (the "turn") and finally the fifth (the "river"), with a round of betting after each of these three phases.
Because any player can bet any amount at any time, no-limit Hold'em is an aggressive game. Even if you don't have the best cards, a huge bet can win the pot by scaring all of the other players into folding their hands. Sometimes you'll see a player bet all of his chips. That's called "going all in".
If more than one player stays in the pot until all the cards are dealt, the winner is the player who makes the best poker hand using any five cards from his hole cards and the community cards. But there's no guarantee that the player with the best hole cards will win the pot.
Let's suppose someone raises the pot in front of me, indicating that they have a strong hand. And let's suppose I have a pair of aces, the best possible starting hand, and I decide to go all in, hoping the other player will call and give me a chance to win even more chips.
And let's assume that my opponent has the ace-king of spades. I got all my chips into the pot with the best hand, so I'm happy. But I can still lose the hand. If the community cards include three spades, his flush beats me. If a ten-jack-queen appears, his ace-high straight beats me. If two kings appear, his three-of-a-kind beats my two pair.
The odds are in my favor, of course. According to the poker odds calculator on cardplayer.com, my aces should win 88% of the time. But one out of every nine times I'm in this situation, I'm going to lose.
Even if I lose, however, it was not a mistake to bet all of my chips. The only way to win is to find situations where you're better off and push them really hard. If the poker gods aren't smiling on me today, so be it. Eight out of every nine times, I'm coming out ahead.
Many other all-in situations are less clear. Suppose I had a pair of eights instead of a pair of aces. I'm still ahead in the hand, since I have a pair and he doesn't. But there are many more ways he can beat me. In addition to hitting a straight or a flush, any ace or king gives him a higher pair. Now I'm only a favorite to win the hand 52% of the time.
In the long run, I still want to be all in with my eights against his ace-king. If we play this hand ten thousand times, I'm going to win 400 more times than I lose, and that's a very good way to make money.
In a single hand, however, it's almost a coin flip. There's a 48% chance I'm going to lose the hand.
If I do go all in, and I do lose all of my chips, does that mean I made a mistake? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the situation.
If I'm a professional poker player in a cash game, and I have a large enough bankroll to guarantee that I'll be able to keep playing for a long time, I did not make a mistake. I got my money in with the best hand, and I can afford to keep playing hands like this, so I'll come out ahead in the long run.
If I'm in the late stages of a tournament, with only a handful of players left, and I'm sitting behind one of the smaller chip stacks at the table, I did not make a mistake. I need to make something happen before the antes eat up my remaining chips, and going all in with an edge can be the best way to get back in the game.
In the early stages of a tournament, when the antes are low and I have enough chips to stay at the table for a few hundred more hands, I probably did make a mistake. Why put my whole tournament at risk on a coin flip? Why not fold my hand and wait for a better opportunity?
In several ways, the decisions faced by baseball managers are similar to those faced by poker players:
1. Poker games and tournaments present you with a series of opportunities to make decisions. So do baseball games and baseball seasons.
2. Poker players must make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Unless the game is rigged, nobody can predict the next card.
Baseball managers face a different kind of uncertainty. They can pinch hit to create a favorable matchup, but there's still a significant chance the batter will make an out. They can call for a sacrifice bunt, but there's no guarantee the batter will get the bunt down.
(In this sense, baseball announcers mislead us when they talk about a chess match between opposing managers. Like a baseball manager, a chess player has to make a series of decisions, think ahead, and consider the moves his opponent might make. But there's no uncertainty in chess. If you elect to play your knight to a certain square, it's done. There's no chance that the knight will try to reach that square and wind up somewhere else. That's a big difference.)
3. Poker players and baseball managers are in it for the long haul. They expect to make many decisions in the course of each game. They expect to play a large number of games. Long-term success is based on their ability to create and exploit situations where the odds are in their favor. Most of the time, their edge is very small, but those small advantages add up over time.
Of course, very few baseball decisions are analogous to having pocket aces, where you're an 88% favorite to win. The vast majority of baseball situations are similar to my pair-of-eights example, where I was only a 52% favorite.
If I'm down by one in the bottom of the ninth and the inning starts with a leadoff single and a walk, should I bunt the runners to second and third? A successful bunt would raise the probability of scoring at least one run from about 65% to about 69%. All other things being equal, if I make this play 100 times, I'll tie the game four more times than I would have otherwise.
If I pinch hit for a weak-hitting catcher, I might increase my expected on-base percentage from .300 to .340. Put another way, I've decreased my chances of losing this battle from 70% to 66%.
If I decide to give a star player a day off every three weeks, I'm doing so in the belief that my chances to win the other 154 games are slightly improved by keeping him rested. This is a tough call to make and to evaluate, because there is very little difference in the probability of winning a game among (a) sitting out a star player, (b) playing him with extra rest, and (c) playing him without any rest.
Because these decisions involve very small changes in the likelihood of success, it's easy for managers to look bad. If you make a move that increases your chances of success from 52% to 56%, there are three possible outcomes. 52% of the time, you would have succeeded either way. 4% of the time, your move turned failure into success. And 44% of the time, you still won't get the result you were seeking.
In other words, you're subject to second-guessing 44% of the time, whether or not your move was the right one.
In this respect, poker players have a much easier time of it. When someone goes all in with the best hand and it doesn't work out, it's not his fault. After all, it's understood to be a game where chance plays a major role, and nobody can control what cards come next.
Poker players have a term for this. It's called a "bad beat". You made a good play and you lost anyway. Too bad. It happens to everyone. Don't even think about asking for sympathy.
Baseball managers rarely get credit for a bad beat. Sometimes you'll hear an astute commentator say that the manager did exactly the right thing and it just didn't work out.
But some people don't seem to understand that most managerial decisions are very close calls made in the face of a lot of uncertainty. In fact, they appear to think the exact opposite is true. They assume that the path not taken would have led to certain success.
If only they had held the runner at third. The next hitter was sure to drive him in.
If only they had used a different reliever. He would have gotten out of the jam.
If only they had made a defensive substitution. He definitely would have made that play cleanly.
Apply that kind of thinking to poker and you're guaranteed to develop bad habits and keep losing until you run out of money to lose.
If only I had called that raise. The next card surely would have been the eight I needed.
If only I had folded that hand. I just knew my opponent was going to catch the card he needed to make his flush. I could feel it.
You get the idea.
Second-guessing managers is a great sport. I do it all the time. But let's be fair. If a manager doesn't seem to grasp the probabilities, or if he makes a move that creates a small edge now but ties his hands for a more crucial situation later, he's fair game. But if a reasonable decision turns out badly, what can you say?
When faced with uncertain outcomes, sometimes you do the right thing and lose anyway. Sometimes you do the wrong thing and get away with it. That's poker. That's baseball. That's life.
]]>July 15, 2005
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the third edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2005. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site, www.diamond-mind.com.
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
Office closed August 3-5
Updated Classic seasons now shipping
In the pipeline
DMB in the NY Times
How offensive?
The Diamond Mind office will be closed from the 3rd through the 5th of August while the staff attends the national convention of the Society for American Baseball Research in Toronto. During that time, we will not be taking or shipping product orders, and we will be able to provide technical support only on a limited emergency basis. The office will resume all normal activities on Monday, August 8th.
We are now shipping eight updated Classic Past Seasons that now include real-life transactions and game-by-game starting lineups. With these additions, you can achieve even higher levels of accuracy and realism as you replay these seasons.
The new seasons are 1934, 1946, 1955, 1965, 1966, 1974, 1976, and 1977 and can be purchased for $19.95 each. Registered owners of the previous editions can upgrade for $5 per season. Free upgrades are available on request to anyone who bought one of these seasons in the past six months.
Since the last newsletter, we have also begun compiling real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups for 1954, 1961, 1962, 1964, and 1975. These updated seasons will be available in the fall.
We ended up spending more time than expected on these past season updates, on new features for version 10, and (to a lesser extent) on our All-time Greatest Players update. As a result, we still have some work to do before releasing the version 9b patch. With the release of these past seasons, finishing the patch is our #1 priority.
In the Sunday, July 10, edition of the New York Times, David Leonhardt wrote a very interesting piece about the World Baseball Classic that is planned for the spring of 2006. Here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/sports/baseball/10score.html
Among other things, the author wrote about using Diamond Mind Baseball to simulate a small portion of a hypothetical world cup. We've already heard from one customer who asked if we could send him the rosters used for those simulations.
Unfortunately, we can't do that. We provided David with the DMB game, the 2005 Projection Disk, and information about the countries of origin for players on that disk. He did the rest, and he's not at liberty to share the details with his readers.
We did not make a serious effort to pick rosters, set rotations, and choose starting lineups for each country. Only a few of the countries have enough MLB players to field a complete team, so we can't simulate the entire tournament without spending a lot of time creating players who are playing in overseas leagues right now.
The best we can do is look at the countries that have plenty of big-league players. Here's a quick rundown:
Puerto Rico has some talent, with a rotation headed by Javier Vazquez and a lineup featuring Carlos Beltran, Ivan Rodriguez, Carlos Delgado, and Jose Vidro. But they don't appear to have enough depth to hang with the big boys.
Venezuela's starting pitching should be a major asset, with a rotation that can draw from Johan Santana, Carlos Zambrano, Freddie Garcia, Carlos Silva, and Kelvim Escobar. And you can build a pretty nice batting order around Carlos Guillen, Melvin Mora, Miguel Cabrera, Bobby Abreu, and Victor Martinez.
One big question is whether the Dominican Republic is ready to challenge the United States for world supremacy. In a short series, I give them a very good chance. How would you like to face a lineup with Miguel Tejada, Albert Pujols, Vladimir Guerrero, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Adrian Beltre, Jose Guillen, and Luis Castillo? Feel free to substitute Alfonso Soriano or Aramis Ramirez if you think they deserve to start. Pedro Martinez and Bartolo Colon head up the pitching staff.
Oh, and Alex Rodriguez has just announced that he'll play for the Dominican Republic. It's his choice because he holds dual citizenship.
It's clear that these three countries, plus Japan and Canada, have some top-flight players to choose from. In addition to MLB stars like Ichiro and Hideki Matsui, Japan can draw from hundreds of players in its own professional league.
Canada has more talent that you might think, too. The rotation is headed by Rich Harden, Erik Bedard, and Jeff Francis, with Eric Gagne and Jesse Crain available to close things out. The lineup can be built around Larry Walker, Corey Koskie, Jason Bay, and Justin Morneau.
But the 800-pound gorilla is still the United States, which has plenty of stars and tons and tons of depth. Consider the following choices that the management of the US team will face:
Starting pitchers -- Who do you pick among Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Kerry Wood, Curt Schilling, Jason Schmidt, John Smoltz, Roy Halladay, Tim Hudson, Roy Oswalt, Ben Sheets, and Mark Prior?
Relief pitchers -- Do you build a bullpen with proven closers like Billy Wagner, Trevor Hoffman, Jason Isringhausen, and Troy Percival? Or use the extra starting pitchers in relief?
Catcher -- Joe Mauer, Jason Varitek, or Mike Piazza?
First base -- Mark Teixeira, Richie Sexson, Mike Sweeney, Todd Helton, or Jim Thome?
Second base -- Jeff Kent, Orlando Hudson, or Mark Loretta?
Third base -- Chipper Jones, Scott Rolen, Troy Glaus, or Eric Chavez?
Shortstop -- Derek Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra, or Michael Young
Outfield -- Barry Bonds, Jim Edmonds, Johnny Damon, Vernon Wells, Lance Berkman, JD Drew, Brian Giles, Gary Sheffield, or Garrett Anderson?
And you know what? I'm not even sure these are all of the legitimate candidates. All I did was skim through a list of American-born players and pick out the obvious candidates. No serious analysis went into these lists.
Because of the depth, especially the pitching depth, I'm convinced that the US would beat all comers in a 162-game season. But that's not how the World Baseball Classic will be contested. After six round-robin games reduce the field to a final four, the survivor will need to win a pair of single-elimination games to emerge on top.
And I, for one, would not bet against the Dominican Republic in a winner-take-all game with Pedro Martinez on the hill. If there's ever a game in which Pedro would leave everything on the field, risking the health of his shoulder if necessary, I believe this is it.In May, it seemed as if every sports writer in the country took time out to write the same article. Scoring is way down. Homers are way down. The near-universal conclusion: the new steroid policy is clearly having an impact.
I was skeptical. It was awfully early in the season to be drawing conclusions about how 2005 would end up. And, to the extent that the changes were real, who's to say that the steroid policy is the only reason, or even the primary reason, for the change? And is it obvious that steroids help batters more than pitchers? Strikeouts are at historically high levels, too.
Baseball history is full of year-to-year fluctuations in offense. Some follow naturally from changes in the game or the player pool, such as new and altered parks, expansion, changes in the strike zone, the introduction of the lively ball, bigger gloves, and World War II.
But major changes in the game don't happen all that often, and there's no shortage of examples where offense rose or fell from one season to the next for no apparent reason. Presumably, the weather, injuries, and a natural ebb and flow in the balance between hitters and pitchers are all possible contributors.
Most of those articles cited four statistics. Not coincidentally, they're the ones in ESPN.com's Juice Box, which on a daily basis compares the following stats for 2005 to the previous three seasons:
2002 2003 2004
HR/gm 1.043 1.071 1.123
R/gm 4.618 4.728 4.814
2B/gm 1.793 1.816 1.837
SPC .417 .422 .428
Before we get into the figures for 2005, let's take a moment to think about the past three years.
Baseball began testing for steroids in 2003. There were no individual penalties attached to positive tests that year, so perhaps nobody was deterred from using. Offense was up across the board, and after the season, the Commissioner's office announced that 5-7% of the players tested positive that year.
Because the number of positive tests was above the threshold in the collective bargaining agreement, the testing program was expanded for 2004 and players faced penalties for the first time. Many have said those penalties were so mild that they could not serve as a deterrent, and I wouldn't dispute that. Not enough tests, no public disclosure for first-time offenders, and small fines and short suspensions even for multiple offenses.
Interestingly, last winter baseball officials announced that positive tests dropped below the 2% mark in 2004. And that makes me wonder.
If the penalties were too mild to deter users, why did the number of positive tests drop so much?
If steroids are so tightly linked to offense, why did scoring increase in a year (2004) when positive tests were dramatically lower?
Furthermore, if only 2% of the players were using in 2004, how could 2005's increased penalties and public scrutiny cause such a large decrease in scoring? Is it really possible that a new regime aimed at 2% of the player population, only some of whom are hitters, could cause an 8% decrease in scoring?
Finally, can we trust those 5-7% and 2% figures? Was this an attempt by the Commissioner's office to shape public opinion by using some creative license in reporting the results of the testing program?
I don't know how to answer those questions, but I do know how to examine some of the other possible explanations for the change in scoring from 2004 to 2005.
One popular theory is that a cool and damp spring held scoring down this year. It's true. It was cooler this spring. Using data from STATS, Inc., I found that the average temperature in games through 5/15 dropped from 66.82 degrees to 65.15 from 2004 to 2005.
Ballpark changes are another factor. Toronto installed FieldTurf, a slower surface than the turf it replaced, and that tends to reduce scoring. In addition, the 2004 Expos left behind Olympic Stadium and Hiram Bithorn Stadium when they became the Nationals and moved into RFK Stadium. RFK has been one of the game's best parks for pitchers.
Another possible factor, albeit a minor one, is a spate of injuries to some of the game's best power hitters. Barry Bonds has yet to take his first swing. Jim Thome struggled with a bad back before landing on the disabled list. Frank Thomas and Dallas McPherson missed the first several weeks of the season. Vladimir Guerrero spent time on the DL. And I believe there were others that I can't recall at the moment.
None of those three factors is enough to explain the entire 8% decrease in scoring we were seeing through early May. But they can explain some of it. More importantly, is it really necessary to explain all of it? Or, to put it another way, is that 8% decrease real?
Let's run that chart again, this time adding three columns related to 2005. I'll show the current season numbers through 5/7, which is roughly when all those articles appeared. And I'll show the numbers for the period from 5/8 to 6/25:
------- 2005 ------
2002 2003 2004 5/7 Since Total
HR/gm 1.043 1.071 1.123 .970 1.057 1.022
R/gm 4.618 4.728 4.814 4.575 4.664 4.629
2B/gm 1.793 1.816 1.837 1.770 1.856 1.822
SPC .417 .422 .428 .409 .427 .420
As you can see, doubles and homers per game are up since May 7, and slugging percentage has almost been on par with last year. Day by day, the year-to-date averages have been gaining ground on 2004. True, we're still not seeing as many runs as we did last year, but that's helped by a decrease in walk rates from 3.34 per game in 2004 to 3.15 this year.
To his credit, Tom Verducci took a more balanced view of the early-season trends in the May 30 issue of Sports Illustrated. He noted that offense tends to rise during the hot summer months and observed that "a deep group of young starting pitchers is entering its prime."
On the other hand, in an article that was supposedly "updated June 22nd", Joe Morgan of ESPN.com wrote:
"Power numbers are down ... At the current pace, about 700 fewer
home runs will be hit this season. That's a significant decrease.
A number of factors must be considered in analyzing this trend,
but make no mistake: The new drug-testing program has had an
effect on power numbers. There might not be any concrete or
scientific proof, but the testing is working to a degree."
Morgan's figure of 700 fewer home runs may have been accurate a few weeks earlier, but the gap had closed substantially since then. Maybe Morgan lifted this "fact" from Verducci's article, which put the number at 668 in late May, and didn't think to check if it was still true.
Where we end up at the end of the season is speculation. We don't know whether the first six weeks or the last seven will prove to be better predictors. But it would be nice to see the so-called experts hold off on their sweeping conclusions until the facts are in.
If our baseball experts are going to argue that the new steroid program is changing the game, perhaps they can start by explaining why scoring is higher in 2005 than it was in 2002, the last year when there was no steroid testing of any kind.]]>May 13, 2005
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the second edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2005. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site.
Topics for this issue:
In the pipeline
Predictions roundup
Joe Crede at short
The April update to the 2005 Projection Disk was released on schedule a couple of months ago. It was sent automatically, and at no additional charge, to everyone who ordered the Projection Disk prior to that date. Projection disk orders received after that date will receive only the updated version of the disk. As has been the case in past years, this is our last update to the projection disk for 2005.
We're still working on the version 9b patch and hope to have it ready in a few weeks. As we get closer to that release, we'll keep you posted via our web site and the DMB forum.
In the last newsletter, we mentioned that we'd started work on an update to the All-time Greatest Players disk, but were undecided about whether to do a small update quickly or take more time to add a couple of hundred additional players. Since then, we've heard from a number of our customers, and their overwhelming preference was for the larger update. So that's what we're going to do.
As noted in February, we've been adding real-life transactions and game-by-game starting lineups to several of our Classic Past Seasons. Within the next few weeks, we plan to release updated editions of the 1934, 1946, 1954, 1955, 1965, 1966, and 1977 seasons. In most cases, the only new or revised content will be the transactions and lineups. In the coming weeks, check our web site for more information about the timing, content and price of these releases.
As you know, we put a lot of time and energy into the projected stats and ratings that appear in our annual Projection Disks. And we put a lot of time and energy into simulating the coming season and writing up our projected standings.
That process includes gathering predicted standings from other sources so we can assess our projections at the end of each season. At the moment, our database includes 61 predictions.
That number includes a few that aren't exactly predictions -- the previous year's final standings, the current year's spring training standings, rankings based on opening day payrolls, and standings derived from the Las Vegas over-under line. One entry is the consensus of several hundred SABR members who participated in their predictions poll. The rest are from individuals or publications.
Nine of the 61 include projected wins and losses for all 30 teams. Interestingly, only 2 of these 9 add up. There are 2,430 games on the schedule, so the wins in any set of projected standings should add up to 2,430. They do for ours and those in Baseball Prospectus Today, but the other five are off by as many as 55 games.
To be fair, two of these nine are over-under betting lines, and they have no obligation to make sure things add up. Their goal is to get equal amounts of money bet on both sides, and if bettors tend to be optimistic about their favorite teams, that would push over/under lines up by a few games.
Other publications don't have that excuse, however, and it's a little disappointing to see a major newspaper put forth projected standings that could never actually happen unless 55 games were magically added to the schedule.
If you read our projected standings article, you may recall that we projected many close races. Our projections are based on the average results from 100 simulated seasons, and it's unlikely that any one season would feature so much competition. Still, it does indicate a level of parity that we haven't seen in a while. (By the way, it came as a pleasant surprise when Tom Verducci mentioned our work while writing about parity in the April 11th edition of Sports Illustrated.)
As has become our custom, we'll come back to this topic after the season. When the final standings are known, we'll assign accuracy scores to all of the predictions in our database and rank them.
For 2005, however, that exercise may be less meaningful than usual. For example, our simulations had (a) New York and Boston within one game of each other, (b) a three-way tie for second in the AL Central, (c) all four AL West teams within five games of each other, and (d) four NL East teams within eight games.
Because so much can happen between now and October, we cannot say with confidence that New York will finish ahead of Boston, that Cleveland is the best bet to finish second in its division, that Oakland will win the West or that the Mets will finish fourth. All of these results are well within the margin of error for this type of exercise.
For example, if the real-life AL West finishes as follows ...
Los Angeles 87 75 .537 -
Seattle 83 79 .512 4
Oakland 81 81 .500 6
Texas 77 85 .475 10
... our accuracy score for that division won't be very good. And yet those standings would confirm much of what our simulations told us -- that the Angels aren't head and shoulders better than the others, that Seattle should bounce back in a big way, and that the Rangers probably can't replicate their success of a year ago.
Nevertheless, we've been using the same method to assess the accuracy of predictions since 1998, and we're not going to change just because we're projecting a lot of close races.
Getting back to the purpose of this article, it's always fun to see how our projections differ from others you might have seen, so let's take a stroll through the divisions and see how the baseball world looks to these experts.
For this discussion, I'll leave out the over/under lines, past standings, and salary ranks, focusing instead on the 56 predictions that represent the views of a publication, an individual, or the consensus of a group of individuals.
The vast majority see the Yankees finishing ahead of the Red Sox. All six of the Boston sportswriters picked New York. And of the 16 who put Boston first, 14 are from Baseball Prospectus. Other than BP, only Baseball America and the Dallas Morning News picked the Red Sox.
(By the way, the BP site has lots of predictions to choose from. One is from their PECOTA projection system. One is from Joe Sheehan's BP Today column. The others are from a poll of BP staffers. We included each staffer individually plus the group average.)
Everyone seems to think there's a great divide between the top and bottom of the AL East. Nobody had any of the remaining three teams cracking the top two. All but 8 had Baltimore third, with 7 of the others picking Toronto for that spot, and one lone voice (BP's James Click) going for Tampa Bay. Click was the only person to pick Baltimore for last place, but 11 expect Toronto to repeat in the cellar.
In the AL Central, only two forecasters have the current leader, the White Sox, winning the division. Six picked Cleveland, with the other 58 giving the nod to the Twins. Kansas City was a unanimous pick to finish last. Overall, these 56 predictions portend a Min-Cle-Chi-Det-KC finish. That's consistent with our simulations, though our results had the middle three bunched so closely together that the order of finish cannot be predicted with a high degree of confidence.
The AL West is the first division where the consensus differs from our simulation results. Just about everyone other than Diamond Mind and Baseball Prospectus picked the Angels to finish first. Keith Woolner of BP picked the Rangers (their only vote), while 13 went for Oakland. BP accounts for 10 of the 13 Oakland picks.
The collective wisdom of this group says the finish will be LA-Oak-Tex-Sea, which mirrors the 2004 finish. If we were being totally scientific, we'd have to say it's too close to call. But that wouldn't be any fun, so we'll stick with the simulation results, which were Oak-LA-Sea-Tex.
The NL East is like the AL West in three ways -- it was tightly bunched in our simulations, our simulations disagree with the consensus, and the consensus matches the 2004 final standings.
Of the 56 predictions, 29 picked Atlanta, 10 picked Florida, 4 took the Mets, and 13 the Phillies. There's a strong sabermetric bias here, as most of the Philly votes are from BP and Diamond Mind. Everyone has Washington in the basement. Even though Philly got more first-place votes than Florida, the group thinks Florida will finish second, with the Phillies third and the Mets fourth.
It's worth noting that although we're among those projecting a last-place finish for the Nationals, we have them being more competitive than most. They averaged 79 wins in our simulations. Among the other eight projections that included wins, the range was 66 to 74.
It's also worth noting that Florida is one of my sleeper picks. Although they finished third in our simulations, they were only seven games off the pace, and it's not hard to imagine them having a breakout season if their young pitchers can add consistency to the flashes of brilliance they've shown over the past two years.
The NL Central was the only division with a runaway winner in our simulations, with the Cardinals averaging 103 wins, the Cubs 83, and the other four clubs under the .500 mark. Others agree that it's a two-team race, as all 56 picked St. Louis or Chicago to win the division, and only a few intrepid souls picked Houston to finish second. But 14 picked the Cubs to win the division, so it's clear that not everyone see this is a walk in the park for the Cards.
The bottom end of the division is a little more interesting. There appears to be broad agreement on the Pirates, with all but two predictions putting them last or second-last. But the Brewers were picked to finish anywhere from 3rd to 6th. All of the third-place votes came from the BP crew, but 30% picked them fourth, and most of those picks were from outside the BP family.
The consensus nearly matched the Diamond Mind simulations. We agree on the first four places (StL-Chi-Hou-Cin), but we've got Pittsburgh two games ahead of Milwaukee, while the consensus has the Brewers in fifth. I can't say that I have a lot of faith in this aspect of our results, mainly because a two-game spread is too small to be meaningful. I won't be the least bit surprised if Pittsburgh finishes in last place.
The NL West shows the biggest gap between the average prediction and our simulation results. Our results were LA-SF-SD-Col-Ari, while the 56 predictions netted out to SD-SF-LA-Ari-Col.
I'm not entirely sure why, but I have more confidence in our NL West results than for some of the other tightly-contested divisions. I'm not yet sold on the Padres, and we may have given Barry Bonds too much playing time in our simulations, though only time will tell on that front. All I know is that when the Dodgers popped out of our simulations as the front-runner, I didn't break out in a sweat.
The bottom of the NL West is another too-close-to-call situation, with only two games separating Colorado and Arizona. This one does make me nervous. I can't figure out what Colorado's management is trying to do, and I could easily see them finishing with the NL's worst record.
It's too early to know whether we'll continue to see the level of parity we saw in the simulations and the first three weeks of the 2005 season. If that keeps up, it'll make for a fascinating six months of baseball, with several multi-team division races and just about everyone having a shot at the wild card.
In the April 28 game between Oakland and Chicago, the White Sox were forced to start Joe Crede at shortstop and Chris Widger at third because of injuries to three infielders. A customer asked whether this would entitle Crede to be rated at short and, if so, what those ratings would be (assuming this was his only game at the position in 2005). Our general rule is to rate a player at any position where he starts at least one game. In this case, however, we're very likely to make an exception. Crede started at short because everyone else was hurt, not because his manager considered him a viable shortstop. In the nine years since Crede was drafted, he has never played a position other than third base. Not in the majors. Not even in the minors. One emergency start doesn't make him a shortstop.
This was also Widger's first game at third base and Jermaine Dye's first at short. (Dye played short in the bottom of the ninth after Crede was ejected.) Neither Widger nor Dye had previously played a single inning at those positions in the majors or the minors.
Because DMB gamers can use players out of position in an emergency, we already have this situation covered. As a result, we don't feel compelled to rate these three players at these positions. That could change as the season unfolds, so we won't make any final decisions until November.
By the way, Crede was ejected for arguing what I felt was a very good call by the home plate umpire. On an inside curve, Crede flinched momentarily and then leaned forward and down to get his shoulder in front of the pitch. The ump ruled that Crede wasn't trying to get out of the way and refused to award him first base. I'd love to see this call made more often.]]>February 24, 2005
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the first edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2005. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site.
Topic for this issue:
2005 Projection Disk
2005 Bill James Handbook
Winter mailing
In the pipeline
Massive 306-player trade rocks baseball world!
Last year, our projected team standings (produced using our 2004 Projection Disk) ranked 4th in accuracy out of the 48 predictions we culled from newspapers, magazines, and web sites. They also ranked 22nd out of 195 entries on Gerry Hamilton's Baseball Predictions web site. You can find the details at these locations:
http://www.diamond-mind.com/articles/tmpred04.htm
http://www.tidepool.com/~ggh1/index.html
We want to do even better in 2005, so we've made some improvements in our projection methodology. Among the improvements is the expanded use of A-ball stats in projecting the performance of top prospects who have yet to accumulate much playing time at AA and above.
We're right on track to begin shipping our 2005 Projection Disk on March 10th. It will include more than 1600 players and will be released in both version 8 and version 9 formats.
Anyone who buys the 2005 Projection Disk prior to March 31st will receive two editions of the disk -- the March 10th edition and a free update in early April that reflects the opening day rosters and events from the remainder of spring training. After March 31st, you'll receive only the April edition.
After the first disk is issued, we'll create a few new players if some long shots make the opening day rosters, and we'll update the rosters and manager profiles to reflect late player moves. But we don't plan to make any changes that would affect the performance of players included in the March edition.
Before the first edition is released, we'll post a new image for RFK Stadium and updated images for Dodger Stadium (where new seats have reduced foul territory) and the newly-renamed Rogers Centre in Toronto (where FieldTurf is being installed).
Don't forget to order your copy of the 2005 Bill James Handbook. The regular edition is only $17.95 and the convenient lays-flat-on-your-desk spiral-bound edition is just $22.95. Hardly a day goes by when we don't reach for the Handbook as part of our work.
Among the many great features of this book are career registers for every active player, including minor-league stats for players with little big-league experience; complete 2004 fielding statistics; expanded pitcher stats that include hitting, fielding, and holding runners; park factors and rankings; left/right splits for all batters and pitchers; conventional and sabermetric leader boards; team standings, augmented by many team performance splits; and team rankings for batting, pitching and fielding.
In the past, we have announced the availability of the new Projection Disk in a letter or postcard that was mailed to all registered owners of the game in the second half of February.
This year, we've already done two large mailings since October and are reaching more and more of you through this newsletter, our web site, and the online forum we launched a few months ago, so we're not going to do a special mailing for the Projection Disk.
We are taking advance orders for the Projection Disk, so when you're ready, you can order by phone (800-400-4803) or through our web store (www.diamond-mind.com). If you prefer to order by mail, you can visit our web site and print an order form that you can mail with your check.
We're working on a number of projects other than the Projection Disk, and while we're not ready to announce release dates for many of these items, we want to let you know where we're headed.
Regarding the game software itself, we're developing a 9b patch that will clean up some bugs that have been reported in recent months. If all goes well, it will be available by the end of April. As with all of our patches, it will be compatible with any seasons you're currently playing, so you'll be able to install it without skipping a beat.
We've begun working on an update to our All-time Greatest Players Disk. At a minimum, this update will add and modify a small number of players based on the 2003 and 2004 seasons. We're pondering the addition of a couple of hundred more historical players as well, but that decision has yet to be made. Obviously, if we go for the larger update, it will stretch out the schedule.
We have started to add real-life transactions and/or game-by-game lineups to some of our Classic Past Seasons. We'll have more on the seasons involved and the release dates in the coming weeks and months.
Finally, we're working on version 10 of the game, too. As most of you know, we don't talk about release dates and new features until we're ready to start field testing a new version, so we're not going to say any more about version 10 at this time. But we know from experience that if we don't mention it at all, a few people will leap to the conclusion that we're not working on it. We are.
OK, now that I have your attention, let me tell you what this essay is really about. We'll get back to those 306 players in a moment.
It has been my contention for many years that the level of talent in the two leagues is about the same. AL and NL teams draft from the same pool of amateur players, compete for the same international players, and trade freely. Players switch leagues through waiver claims and free agency. The system allows for, even encourages, the flow of talent between leagues.
That's why I often chuckle when I hear baseball commentators and writers go on about how the leagues are so different. They'll say that one is a fastball league and the other is an off-speed league or that the AL parks are smaller.
I suspect that many of these so-called experts fail to see how the DH rule affects the stats compiled by a league's players. Fact is, when you take out the hitting stats for pitchers and designated hitters, the two leagues look pretty similar. From time to time, I've run the numbers for large groups of seasons, and it's not an exaggeration to say that the adjusted league rates are essentially identical. Dave Smith of Retrosheet did the same thing, reaching the same conclusion.
In any single season, of course, there's room for variation, random or otherwise, so the adjusted totals are not always an exact match. In 2004, for example, the league rates without pitcher hitting and designated hitters were as follows, expressed on a per-1000-plate-appearance basis:
AL NL
--- ---
Hits 244 241
Doubles 48 49
Triples 5 5
Homers 29 30
Hit batsmen 10 10
Unintentional walks 78 82
H + HBP + UW 332 333
Strikeouts 162 165
Sacrifice bunts 6 6
Sacrifice flies 7 7
Not much difference, is there? In fact, intentional walks are the only major source of differences in the league rates. We can remove pitcher hitting from the totals, but we're left with the effect of walking #8 hitters to get to those pitchers. That's why intentional walks are excluded from the walk totals and plate appearances in this table.
Of course, similar league rates don't guarantee that talent levels are the same. For instance, if one league has more than its share of star players but that extra talent is evenly divided between pitchers and hitters, the league totals wouldn't be affected too much. Another possibility is that a league's surplus of hitters could be offset by a collection of parks that favor pitchers.
Still, the fact that the adjusted league averages have been very similar for the last thirty years lends weight to the argument that the leagues are far more alike than different, especially when you combine that with the knowledge that baseball has long operated with rules that facilitate the distribution of talent.
But isn't it possible for the talent base to shift for a period of time even in a system that tends to push things toward an equilibrium state in the long run?
During the winter between the 2003 and 2004 seasons, for example, more star players moved from the NL to the AL . Vladimir Guerrero, Curt Schilling, Javier Vazquez, Jose Guillen, Javy Lopez, Ivan Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Kevin Brown joined AL teams via trade or free agency that winter. Other players headed to the NL, but they weren't as good as this group.
Money had something to do with that, of course. The arms race between New York and Boston pushed the payrolls for those AL East rivals to unprecedented levels, and the new owner in Anaheim wasn't shy about bidding for top free agents.
For years I've wanted to examine the off-season movement of players a little more systematically, and I finally got around to it this month. To that end, I generated a list of players who spent at least part of the 2004 season in one league but are now heading to spring training with a team in the other league. (Team affiliations are based on rosters from our Projection Disk as of February 15th.)
This list includes players who changed leagues during the 2004 season, so it's not just a look at off-season player movement. Carlos Beltran was in the AL for half the 2004 season, so he's on the list. Same with Nomar Garciaparra.
It turns out that 306 players fit this pattern. That's where I got the headline proclaiming a massive multi-player trade, as if the leagues were just two teams swapping players.
The players now in the AL racked up 15,065 plate appearances in the 2004 NL, while those on the spring rosters of NL teams stepped to the plate 13,279 times in the 2004 AL season. That adds up to about 15% of total playing time. Meanwhile, the league-changing pitchers account for about 14% of the innings thrown in 2004. That's a significant amount of player movement.
But this is clearly a case where quality is more important than quantity. We expect fringe players to move from organization to organization, looking for their next opportunity to play a utility role or fill out a bullpen. What about the really good players?
Before we start looking at individuals, we can get a sense for the overall quality of the players moving from league to league by adding up their 2004 stats.
Players now on AL rosters posted a .260 batting average with NL teams in 2004, reaching base at a .318 clip and slugging .398. All of those figures are below the league averages, indicating that many of these transients are indeed fringe players.
Players now on NL rosters fared slightly better in their 2004 AL appearances, hitting .257 with a .327 on-base average and a .404 slugging percentage. That's not a big edge, to be sure, but if the 2004 stats are any indication, a little more talent flowed in the NL direction this winter.
It's harder to compare pitchers because of the DH rule, but it seems as if the AL gets the edge in newly-acquired pitching talent. Pitchers in camp with AL teams posted a 4.29 ERA in the NL last year, while those moving in the other direction allowed 4.89 earned runs per nine innings.
Furthermore, the group of pitchers moving to the AL allowed a batting average of .259 and a slugging average of .421, while those joining the NL were at .282 and .449, respectively. That's a big difference, bigger than the DH can explain.
Moving on, let's see how things look when we identify some of the top players who changed leagues.
The ten hitters now on AL rosters who had the most plate appearances in the NL last year are Scott Podsednik (now with Chicago), Steve Finley (Ana), Jason Kendall (Oak), Adrian Beltre (Sea), Edgar Renteria (Bos), Tony Womack (NY), Shea Hillenbrand (Tor), Danny Bautista (TB), Richard Hidalgo (Tex), and Sammy Sosa (Bal).
The plate appearance leaders who moved in the other direction were Matt Lawton (Pit), Carlos Lee (Mil), Omar Vizquel (SF), David Eckstein (StL), Jose Cruz (Ari), Cristian Guzman (Was), Jose Guillen (Was), Carlos Delgado (Flo), Joe Randa (Cin), and Jose Valentin (LA).
The players moving to the AL hit 24 homers per 1000 PA with NL teams last year, while the new NL players hit 25 per 1000 PA in the AL in 2004. The most notable moves to the AL are Beltre (48 HR), Finley (36), Sosa (35), Hidalgo (25), and Keith Ginter (19). The NL gained Delgado (32), Lee (31), Valentin (30), Guillen (27), and Cruz (21).
Scott Podsednik takes his 70 steals to the AL . Of the others, only Womack (26) and Lawton (23) swiped more than 20 bases in their former league.
Five players with 90+ RBI call a new league home this year, with three of them joining the NL and two the AL . Beltre takes his 121 ribbies to Seattle and Finley his 94 to Anaheim , while Guillen (104, Was), Delgado (99, Flo), and Lee (99, Mil) head the other way.
Looking over the totals for league-changing hitters, I don't see much of a shift in other batting categories. The new NL players have a slight edge in doubles and unintentional walks per 1000 PA, and they grounded into double plays about 10% less often. Except for Podsednik, the stolen base and caught stealing totals are similar.
The AL pitchers who threw the most innings in the NL last year are Randy Johnson (NY), Carl Pavano (NY), David Wells (Bos), Jaret Wright (NY), Matt Clement (Bos), Jose Lima (KC), Casey Fossum (TB), Kevin Millwood (Cle), Dustin Hermansen (Chi), and Paul Byrd (Ana).
The innings-leaders among pitchers who no longer have to face the DH are Mark Mulder (SL), Pedro Martinez (NY), Javier Vazquez (Ari), Mark Redman (Pit), Tim Hudson (Atl), Darryl May (SD), Esteban Loaiza (Was), Derek Lowe (LA), Jon Lieber (Phi), Ramon Ortiz (Cin), and Victor Zambrano (NY).
It's hard to say which league gained more front-line talent because there are question marks about a lot of these guys. Johnson and Martinez are studs, obviously, but one is getting up in years and the other has had to baby his shoulder for several seasons. The AL newcomers must prove that they can handle DH lineups. Meanwhile, Mulder had a horrible second half, Hudson 's strikeout rate was way down, and Lowe is coming off a poor season.
A few more quality starts landed in the AL , with the leaders being the three new Yankees -- Johnson (26), Pavano (23), and Wright (22). Next on the list, with 18 each, are Boston 's duo of Clement and Wells. The leaders among new NL pitchers are Pedro (22), Mulder (18), Lieber (16), Redman (16), and Vazquez (16).
If Holds are any guide, AL teams gained some ground in middle relief. Five pitchers now in the AL had at least 16 NL holds last year. Mike Stanton (NY) leads this list with 25, followed by Luis Vizcaino (Chi, 21), Felix Rodriguez (NY, 20), Kyle Farnsworth (Det, 18), and Steve Kline (Bal, 16). Only one pitcher, Jim Mecir (Flo, 21), who is now in the NL had more than 10 AL holds last year.
Overall, the win-loss record of the new NL pitchers was 174-175 in the AL last year, while those moving to the AL were 172-203 in the NL in 2004. A total of 44 saves (mostly Hermansen and Octavio Dotel) moved to the AL , with only 19 going the other way. Thanks to Mulder, Lowe and Hudson, the GDP rate for the new NL pitchers is much higher. The pitchers moving to the AL had higher strikeout rates, but they walked 8% more hitters, too. And a quick look at pickoffs and opposition stolen bases shows that the new NL pitchers are quite a bit better at shutting down the running game.
I had a lot of fun compiling and reviewing these numbers, but I'm quite aware of their limitations. More than the 2004 stats, what matters is how these players will perform for their 2005 teams. I thought about ranking these players based on projected 2005 stats, but that would have told us less about how these players impacted their former leagues in 2004. Some combination of 2004 stats and 2005 projections might be the best way to assess talent migration.
In any case, we'll be back next month with our annual projections article, the one where we simulate the season many times, average the results, present projected team standings for the 2005 season, and comment on the outlook for every team.
In that article, we'll talk about the impact of these league-changing players at the team level, and we'll tell you how these players performed in our simulations. Of course, by then many of you will already have our 2005 Projection Disk, so you'll be able to see those projections for yourself and play out your own seasons.
]]>December 16, 1999
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the fifth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site (www.diamond-mind.com).
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
We've begun publishing our team reviews for the 1999 season. Each review consists of a detailed comparison of projected to actual stats for all key players on the team, team and player comments, and a brief look ahead to the 2000 season. They'll be published more-or-less simultaneously on our web site (www.diamond-mind.com) and on ESPN.com. Two new teams will appear each week until early March.
I'm happy to report that we'll begin shipping today, as previously announced. If you've been waiting to place your order for the 1999 Season Disk, please keep in mind that any new orders will have to wait until we've shipped all of the advance orders. It'll take us a few days to get everything out the door, so we cannot guarantee delivery of new orders by Christmas. We will, of course, do everything we can to ship everything by Tuesday, December 21, so most items should be there for the holidays.
For 1999, we've added real-life salaries to the season disk. A few years ago, we made space in our player file to store the salary and contract expiration year for each player. It was never our intent to fill in these slots with information on real-life contracts. Rather, we added them so Diamond Mind Baseball leagues that use salary cap systems would be able to enter their salaries, see those salaries on screen and in reports, and have those salaries carried forward from year to year by our season disk migration feature.
But we've been asked by quite a few of our customers to add the real-life salary information anyway. And that's what we've done this year. We're grateful to Doug Pappas, a longtime Diamond Mind customer and member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), who agreed to let us use a salary database that he has meticulously compiled for the past few years.
NOTE: Because the salary slot was originally designed to hold the salary assigned in your league draft, not the real-life salary, the migration feature carries forward the salary from last year's league disk. This means that if you run migrate, the real-life salaries on your 1999 disk will be wiped out and replaced by the salaries from the league disk you are migrating from. We are aware that this may not be the behavior you wish to see, so we plan to enhance the migration feature in version 8 of the game so you have more control over how salaries are handled in the migration process.
Please remember to read the player disk notes when your 1999 Season Disk arrives. They contain a lot of useful information about how we develop our ratings, and they talk about specific players whose ratings might differ from the past or from the perception created by the baseball media. Many of the questions that people ask us this time of year have already been answered by those notes.
In version 7, you can find them by choosing Info from the main menu, choosing Source and picking the player directory, then using the View command to display the notes. From there, you can print the notes if you choose.
The 1999 Season Disk is a copyrighted product of Diamond Mind and contains real-life statistics that are copyrighted by STATS, Inc. If you give a copy of this season disk to someone else, you're violating the law and harming both Diamond Mind and STATS.
Having said that, it's also true that our recommended procedure for running a Diamond Mind league is for the commissioner to set up the league and make all transactions on a master copy of the season disk, and then to send copies of that disk to league members, PROVIDED THOSE LEAGUE MEMBERS ARE REGISTERED OWNERS of Diamond Mind Baseball and the season disk.
We don't want to put league commissioners in the position of having to police the copyright laws on our behalf. All we ask is that the commissioner send us a list of league members so we can check our database of registered customers and indicate which individuals are entitled to receive the league disk.
I believe the vast majority of our customers are honest, and that's one of the reasons why we have never been forced to copy protect our disks. But we do get calls from people who believe they don't need to buy the season disk because they'll be getting it from their league. In most cases, the individual is simply unaware that this is a violation of our copyright, and when we explain the situation, they're happy to buy a legal copy.
This seems like a good time to answer a few of questions we get each year about the season disk.
Q: How do you decide whether to rate a player at a defensive position?
A: Generally speaking, a player gets a rating at any position where he's started at least one game or played more than a few innings. If someone has played only a few innings at a position, it depends on the player and the position. If he has established his ability to play that position in recent years, we'll generally give him a rating. If he got only a cup of coffee in the big leagues and doesn't have any other defensive ratings, we'll give him a rating if it's his primary position. But if it's an especially difficult position (such as CF, SS, or C), we generally won't give the rating to someone who hasn't established the ability to play there, especially if he's a very good hitter. For that reason, Chipper Jones isn't rated at SS this year, even though he played an inning there.
Q: If a player is used at a position where he has no range rating, how well will he perform defensively?
A: It depends on the position and the player's other defensive ratings. The game looks to see whether the player is rated at a similar position and then assigns an adjusted rating accordingly. That means that players can move to similar and easier positions without much of a penalty. For example, you can move a good defensive CF to another outfield position and he will continue to play well at his new position. And you can move a good shortstop to second or third and he'll continue to play well. But if you move someone to catcher, or put a first baseman in the outfield, or move your right fielder to third, you can expect to pay a price defensively.
Q: Our draft league uses players from both leagues. Does that mean we should use the Neutral Era for league play?
A: The Neutral Era represents the 20th century average in several ways -- overall level of offense, composition of offense (rates of doubles, triples, homers), pitcher durability, and error rates at each position.
If you use the Neutral Era instead of the "1999 A" or "1999 N" era, you'll get less offense, fewer homers, more complete games, and more errors. In short, you'll get "20th century average" baseball instead of 1999 baseball. There's nothing wrong with using the Neutral Era for your league, and some people do this just because they don't like the offensive explosion we've seen in the past few years.
But there's no need to use the Neutral Era just because you're using players from both the AL and NL. After removing pitcher hitting stats from the NL, the AL and NL stats have been virtually identical almost every season in recent memory. That means your league can use either the NL era or AL era from the current season and get essentially the same results, because Diamond Mind automatically adjusts for the effects of the DH.
Q: How well does Diamond Mind adjust for the player's home ballpark in real life? For example, last year Pedro Astacio had a 5.04 ERA overall but it was 7.16 at Coors Field and 3.60 away from home. If Pedro plays in Dodger Stadium in a Diamond Mind Baseball league, will he be closer to the away numbers or close to the overall numbers?
A: Our system for rating players takes full account of real-life ballpark effects. Last year, Coors Field increased scoring by 63% and Dodger Stadium was close to neutral. Astacio's personal home-road splits were wider than for the park as a whole, so he won't be projected to go as low as his road ERA of 3.60, but the change in parks will help him a lot. In fact, I've been thinking I might try to draft him or trade for him in my league.
On a similar note, our system also adjusts for the DH rule. The ERA in the AL generally runs about a half a run higher than the NL, so a pitcher with a 4.00 ERA in the AL performed about as well as someone with a 3.50 ERA in the NL, assuming their home parks are similar.
When you're evaluating players for your league draft, keep the park and DH factors in mind. Colorado hitters won't be nearly as good in other parks, Rockies pitchers will be much better in other parks, AL pitchers will see their ERAs drop if they move to a non-DH league, and so on.
Q: STATS, Inc. publishes a player's batting average depending on where in the order he hits, how he hits against certain pitchers, how he hits with certain counts, etc. Some our managers are convinced that where a player hits in the order on his Diamond Mind Baseball team will be affected by his ML average in the same spot. Also some managers think that if player A is 0-20 vs a certain pitcher that that will be reflected in the game. Are they right?
A: The statistics that determine batting and pitching performance in Diamond Mind Baseball are park-adjusted totals and left/right splits. If you start adding in other splits -- such as batting order position, day vs night, grass vs turf, and month-by-month -- you quickly reach a point where the data is statistically meaningless because the samples are too small.
Chances are, a given player had only a few appearances in a season against a left-handed pitcher, on artificial turf, in a day game, and while he was batting in a certain position. And anything can happen in a few plate appearances. Heck, anything can happen in a week's worth of games (just look at the weekly leaders in USA Today) or even in a month's worth of games (check out my article on the meaning of monthly stats at www.diamond-mind.com/april.htm). And it's bad game design to build a factor into a game when that factor is based on data containing huge amounts of random variation.
It's even worse for individual batter/pitcher matchups. In the 1999 season, there were 189,692 plate appearances, and there were 72,438 different batter/pitcher matchups. That means each matchup involved an average of 2.6 plate appearances. There's no way to do anything meaningful will small amounts of data like this. And even if there was, it would still only make sense to build this feature into the game if it was true that past performance in a matchup was an indicator of future performance, and I'm not at all sure that it is.
So the factors we use are the ones that actually mean something: overall performance, park effects, and left/right splits. Even so, some of the sample sizes are on the small side for part-time players. That's one reason why I like our projection disks, where player performance is based on three years of major-league and minor-league data. In a single real-life season, there are always a few guys who hit .385 against left-handed pitching solely due to chance, and these guys become too valuable in your Diamond Mind Baseball games. That doesn't happen with the projection disk.
When interpreting our ratings, please keep the following things in mind:
An Average rating is a compliment. We rate players relative to other major leaguers at the same position. An average rating means that the player has performed at a level attained by only a handful of other professional baseball players.
Don't read too much into a range rating. When we say that a player has Very Good range at a position, it means he gets to more balls than the average player. It's not an overall evaluation of his defensive ability. We have separate ratings for errors, throwing, and passed balls, and it's not unusual for someone to have an Average range rating and much better ratings in the other categories.
Our ratings reflect the ability to make plays, not raw athletic skills. A very fast outfielder might still be rated Average or below if he doesn't get a good jump on the ball. An infielder needs many skills -- positioning, quick feet, good hands, a strong and accurate arm, and good judgment -- to make plays in the big leagues, and a deficiency in any of these areas might be enough to turn a very flashy player into an average playmaker. Someone with average speed might be an excellent baserunner because he has great instincts about when batted balls will fall in for a hit. An outfielder who doesn't have a strong arm may still be successful in slowing down the running game if he gets to the ball and gets rid of it quickly. That's why we study real-life play-by-play data to see which players are actually getting the job done.
Some positions are harder to play than others. If we give player A an Average rating in center field and player B a Very Good rating in left field, it doesn't mean we think player B is better than player A. The standard for center field play is much higher. Conversely, a player who is not regarded as a great outfielder may still get a decent rating in left field, because that's where managers often put the guys who can't play a more demanding position.
If someone did not make any errors at a position in real life, it doesn't guarantee that they won't make any in Diamond Mind Baseball. Beyond a certain amount of error-free playing time, we feel they've earned an error rating of zero. Below that level, the rating is based on a weighted average of zero (for the time they played) and the league average (for enough playing time to bring them up to the level where a player would earn the zero rating).
The error ratings that appear on the game screen (and the roster report) represent the projected number of errors this player would make at this position in 100 full games (900 innings) in the era the league is playing in. If you move this player to another era (or run the roster report from the Exhibition League, which is linked to the Neutral Era), the e rating changes accordingly.
The Prone injury rating doesn't necessarily mean that the player will miss a lot of playing time. In fact, our injury system is pretty mild compared with real life, and you won't see Diamond Mind Baseball players going down with season-ending injuries in April. We give the Prone rating to anyone who (a) was on the disabled list at any time during the season or (b) missed 15 or more games due to injury without going on the disabled list.
The Clutch and Jam ratings are given to players who (a) performed at a very high level in the late innings of close games during the season and (b) performed at a level higher in these situations than in other situations. But the most important thing to remember about these ratings is that they DO NOT play a large role in the game. Personally, I would never use a weaker player over a better one just because the weaker player has a better Clutch or Jam rating.
One very important thing to remember is that if you draft new rosters (either by hand or using the draft utility from our web site), you need to create a manager profile for each team. The computer manager is designed to work hand-in-hand with the information in the profile, and it will get confused if you do not at least set up a starting rotation, bullpen roles, and saved lineups. And remember that the computer manager will always choose lineup #1 against a lefty starter and #2 against a righty starter, no matter what you happened to name those lineups.
On the pitcher profile, there are three mode available to you -- Strict, Skip, and Time. The Time setting is used to give each player the number of starts they had in real life. But this usually doesn't work well in draft league settings because most teams don't have a group of pitchers who started exactly 162 games. Instead, set up a rotation and use either the Strict or Skip mode, and the computer manager will follow your rotation, making adjustments only when necessary to handle injuries.
On the batter side, you can choose GameByGame or TrackStarts for your depth charts. TrackStarts mode was designed for replays using real-life rosters, and it makes sure that every player gets the right number of starts at each position against left- and right-handed pitchers. The GameByGame setting was designed for draft league situations. In that mode, the computer manager will faithfully use your saved lineups, making changes to those lineups only if a starter is injured or if you've established non-zero spot start percentages for some players.
When I set up my draft-league team, I usually start by using the manager profile generator to create a profile. (I would never use that profile as-is, because the generator is designed to produce profiles for real-life season replays. But it's faster to start with that profile and make changes than to create a profile from scratch.) Then I set up a Strict rotation, put my depth charts into GameByGame mode, and change all of the spot start percentages to zero except for a few positions where I'm trying to spread the playing time among a few players to avoid going over our leagues playing time limits.
In parallel with our work on the 1999 Season Disk, we've been working on version 8 of the game. We'll discuss more of the new features in the next newsletter. Until then, I hope you enjoy playing with the 1999 Season Disk as much as I enjoy working on the ratings.
]]>October 14, 1999
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site (www.diamond-mind.com).
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
New baseball articles
1999 Season Disk and 2000 Projection Disk
Two tales of woe from north of the border
Version 8 news
We've written three new articles in recent weeks. The first was a quick review of the 1999 season, focusing on teams and players who performed much better or worse than expected. The second was a shorter piece that looked at some interesting (and in my mind questionable) moves made by the managers in the critical Friday night games on the last weekend of the NL season. The last shows how the Diamond Mind projected standings for 1999 stacked up against those of 31 other analysts, writers and publications. (We weren't #1, but we did quite well.)
You can find these articles on our web site at:
http://www.diamond-mind.com/articles/index.html
We've begun sending out letters announcing the availability of the 1999 Season Disk (December 16) and the 2000 Projection Disk (early March). It will take us about ten business days to get them all out the door, so many of you won't receive yours until the end of October. If you wish to order any of our products by mail, this mailing includes an order form and postage-paid business reply envelope. By the way, please note your customer number -- it's above your name on the mailing label -- so you can write it on the order form.
If you wish to order by email or phone, there's no need to wait. We can take your order whenever you're ready. The prices are the same as last year:
1999 Season Disk $29.95 2000 Projection Disk $29.95 1999 and 2000 combo $44.95
Shipping and handling is $3 for delivery by first class mail and $2 for delivery via email. If you order the 1999 and 2000 combo, you'll receive both for a single shipping and handling charge. Feel free to phone or email us for the prices of priority mail or overnight shipping.
Some quick notes on how we handle these advance orders:
- we ship the orders in roughly the same sequence that the orders were received, so there's a bit of an advantage to getting your order in early. Any orders for email delivery or priority shipping (including overnight) will be sent out the first day the disk is available.
- we will do our best to ship all of the advance orders so that they arrive before Christmas, but we cannot guarantee Christmas arrival. We expect to BEGIN shipping on December 16th, but it will take a few days to get everything out the door.
- if your order includes a mix of currently available items (past seasons, version 7 games or upgrades) and these new seasons, we will ship what we can right away and send the new disks as soon as they are ready (unless you ask us to do it differently). In these cases, we'll cash your check or charge your credit card for the full cost of the order. Even though we'll be shipping more than once, you still pay only a single shipping charge.
- if your order consists solely of advance orders for these season disks, we will wait until about a week before the ship date to deposit your check or charge your credit card. That week gives us time to resolve any credit card problems without having to delay any shipments.
Thanks in advance to all of you who choose to order these products.
Thanks to Diamond Mind customer Steve Turner for sending this:
Before I begin this story, I must make one fact very clear. I am a jinx for my favorite baseball team. Sure, other people cry loudly that they are a jinx for their favorite team, but I have proof! Examine the following facts:
1977-1991 - Steve living in and about Toronto; Toronto Blue Jays never advance to the World Series
1992-1993 - Steve living in primeval forest in Northern Ontario (300 miles from nearest professional baseball team, which happens to be the Jays); Blue Jays win first back-to-back World Series since the '77-'78 Yankees.
1994-1999 - Steve moves back to Toronto; Jays have yet to make the playoffs since '92/'93.
Compelling proof or sheer coincidence? Let's delve further into the story...
October 1992. The Jays finish first in the AL East. Throughout Canada there is hope that maybe, just maybe, this might be the year that the Jays go all the way. In fact, their chances have risen exponentially because Steve Turner has moved away from Toronto (not to take anything away from Jack Morris, Dave Winfield et al.), although this little-known fact is not mentioned in the media.
Canadian Thanksgiving Day, October 1992. Literally, in the middle of a forest, I sit there listening to Game 4 of the ALCS on my radio. Toronto overcomes a 6-1 deficit to beat the A's 7-6 in extra innings. In the flush of victory, I run over to a nearby swamp and let out a traditional Ojibway cow-moose call. A large Bull breaks through the bush about 20 metres opposite where I was and joins in the victory celebration.
It is impossible to describe one's feelings at such a time. Your team is one game away from its first World Series appearance and the thrill of potential victory lifts your soul to unimaginable heights, and yet at the same time, in another small part of your mind, a little voice is reminding you that the bull moose a stone's throw away is at least 1500 pounds bigger than you, you have no weapon and your celebratory cow call has probably driven him into the opening stages of intense sexual urges that will remain unfulfilled because, as you increasingly realize, you and the moose share nothing in common other than the fact you are both male.
Having survived that ordeal, I have to wait till I return to my office a couple of days later to witness the Jays (televised) clinch their rightful berth in the 1992 World Series.
Chapter 2. My cabin in the bush had two things that separated me from the manner in which my ancestors lived: electricity and radio. Relying on these items enabled me to experience something that very few people born after 1960 ever encountered, listening to a World Series on radio.
In fact, I was ordered by family members to remain at my cabin for the duration of the series. Their intimate knowledge of my intangible impact on the outcome of important Toronto playoff games gave them the right to ban me from watching games at their houses. So be it, I thought.
However, I paddled across the lake to my cousin's house to watch Game One. Unfortunately, Jack Morris decided to give Damon Berryhill an early Christmas gift as Berryhill's sixth inning homer brought off an Atlanta Braves victory. No sooner had the game ended than the phone rang at my cousin's house. It was my sister. She wanted to know if I watched the game there. My cousin replied in the affirmative, after which I could hear my lovely sister screaming and cursing and, in not so many words, telling my cousin NEVER to allow me over to his house to watch a Jays game till next April.
The Jays won the next three games. This I learned from listening to my trusted radio at my little bush cabin. The Jays could win their first World Series with a Game Five victory, so I HAD to witness this event. I conspired to watch the game at my cousin's once more.
Sure enough, within minutes of Lonnie Smith's grand slam, the phone rang at my cousin's house. It was my brother, calling from Toronto. "Is Steve there?" I could hear him say. "Yes", replied my cousin. My poor cousin was then submitted to an extreme tongue lashing. My cousin's sister called next, and it was confirmed that yes, indeed, Steve watched the game. Now my relations in North Bay knew. I was beginning to feel like Custer at this point.
Nobody on the lake I lived on extended me an invitation to watch Game Six. I was left to listen to the game the old-fashioned way; at a cabin in the forest with a radio that could barely pick up the signal.
After the Braves tied the game in the bottom of the ninth, I couldn't stand it anymore. I turned off the radio and looked outside at the stars, content to go to bed and enjoy the solitude of the forest in which I dwelt.
Yeah right, who in their right mind would do that! The radio was turned back on, then off, then on, then off again. The tension was unbearable. The radio was turned on once more and, finally, Mike Timlin fielded Otis Nixon's bunt and threw to Joe Carter for the final out.
The Turner house exploded into euphoria! (Well, to be honest, it was just me) I ran outside and began jumping up and down in the clearing beside my camp -essentially the same leap for joy Joe Carter would mimic after hitting his historic homer in the '93 Series. Circumstances left me to share my exhilaration with the immediate flora and fauna. I could have hugged the pine trees, high-fived the alderbush and had my cries of joy responded to by the horned owls, but unlike the estimated one million people who poured onto the streets of Toronto to join the Series celebration, I only gave a few of the local bears and moose the fright of their life that night.
I have yet to watch Game Six of the '92 Series. Been over seven years now.
This is my (Tom Tippett's) own story.
As many of you know, I was born and raised in the suburbs of Toronto. I first became interested in baseball in the late 1960s, and because my town did not have a major league team then, I rooted mainly for the Red Sox (Yaz!), Expos (first Canadian team), and Reds (just because I liked the name Cincinnati).
My beloved Red Sox broke my heart in 1972 when they lost the division title to Woodie Fryman and the Tigers on the last weekend of the season. They did it again in 1975, but that blow was softened by the fact that another of my teams (the Big Red Machine) did them in this time.
The Blue Jays came to town in 1977, and I went to 23 games that year. They lost 21 of them. One of the wins came on a rainy September evening when Earl Weaver pulled his Orioles off the field after five innings because he claimed the field was unsafe. He later admitted that it was a ploy -- Toronto starter Jim Clancy was up 4-0 and nearly unhittable, and Weaver figured he had a better chance of winning the protest than the game. The other win was against the Red Sox in the heat of the pennant race, and I was rooting for the Sox that night.
The final tally: twenty-three games, zero nine-inning wins by the team I was rooting for. I soon began to feel I could help my team most by staying home.
During those early Blue Jay years, they were definitely my favorite team. But they were usually thirty games out by mid-August, so I didn't feel any guilt about switching my allegiance back to the Red Sox for the stretch drive. And those Red Sox broke my heart in 1977 by coming up 2-1/2 games short and again in that famous 1978 Bucky Dent playoff game. (I left work early that day and listened to the last three innings on my car radio in a downtown Toronto parking lot. I can still feel the anguish as Yastrzemski's game-ending popup settled into the glove.)
Over the next few years, the Blue Jays began to improve and the Red Sox settled back into the pack. Finally, in 1983, the Jays contended for the first time. I still have a clipping of the AL standings from an August day when the Jays were atop the division for the last time that year.
Steve Turner can undoubtedly relate to the next part of the story. I moved to Boston (to attend graduate school) in August, 1983, and have lived here ever since. The moment I left Toronto, the Jays began a streak of ten consecutive seasons in which they finished at least ten games over .500.
After spending a decade as a Red Sox fan living in Toronto, I was now a Blue Jays fan living in Boston. And the heartbreak continued. First, the Jays blew a 3-1 series lead to KC in 1985 (Bobby Cox NEVER should have tried to get three starts out of Dave Stieb). Then the Red Sox let the 1986 World Series slip through their fingers (or legs, as the case may be). Not to be outdone, the Jays blew a 3-1/2 game lead to the Tigers in the last week of the 1987 season.
At that point, my nerves couldn't take it any more, and I vowed that I would never ever get so involved with a team that I would lie awake at night sweating over what might happen next. I continued to root for my team (the Jays were #1 in my heart), but I tried not to get carried away.
From 1988 to 1991, the Jays and Sox took turns winning the division, but neither team was strong enough to contend with their western rivals (the powerful Athletics teams and the 1991 Twins) in the playoffs. This brings us to 1992.
My wife Jodi and I got engaged in June of that year. Not wanting to postpone the wedding until the following spring or summer, we set the date -- Sunday, October 25th. A few weeks later, one of my baseball buddies pointed out that I'd be getting married on the day game 7 of the World Series was to be played. When I admitted that the thought had never occurred to me, he figured I must really be head over heels for this woman. (He was right.)
Sure enough, the Jays went on to win the division and the AL pennant, and there was a real chance that I'd miss the event I'd been waiting for since I had become a baseball fan 25 years earlier. If the series went the distance, I would be honeymoon-bound and without radio or TV while flying cross-country for the entirety of game seven.
Fortunately, it didn't come to this. Saturday night, on the eve of my wedding, the Jays and Braves were locked in a nail-biter. Toronto carried a 2-1 lead into the ninth but gave up a run to send the game into extra innings. It was about 11:30pm. My wedding was at 10:00 the next morning. What do I do now? Do I stay up and watch the end of the game, not knowing how long that might take? Or do I turn off the tube and get the sleep I need for the big day?
I thought about this for a couple of minutes, and then . . . clicked off the set and went to bed. And, whaddya know, my guys won. Oddly enough, the winning run was scored a little after midnight, so I can truthfully say that my team won a World Series for the first time on my wedding day.
(They won #2 a year later while my wife and I were on a mini-vacation to celebrate our first anniversary. I didn't watch that deciding game either, but I did catch Carter's homerun on the radio as we drifted off to sleep.)
Did they win because I wasn't watching? A part of me, remembering all the near-misses and my 0-for-23 record in 1977, will always wonder if my decision not to watch somehow removed the curse my teams always seemed to be under.
Truth is, I don't really believe I'm a jinx, and in an era when only one of thirty teams can take the prize each year, I'm content with the fact that a team I've rooted for has won two World Series in my lifetime.
These days, I root for good baseball. Each spring I pick a different team to follow, usually a young squad that has a chance to surprise people. Last year it was the Reds, this year the Royals. I was a year early on the Reds, so maybe the Royals will make their move next year. Or maybe another team will pique my interest before the first pitch is thrown in 2000.
In the last newsletter, I promised that we would begin to talk about some of the new features that would be coming in version 8. I'm going to share a few of the goodies with you in this issue.
Before I do, I want to point out that we're talking about these features first because they're among those that are finished and tested, not because they're the most important things we're working on. As we put the finishing touches on other enhancements, we'll talk about them too, either through the newsletter or via our web site.
SB/CS/PO for pitchers and catchers. Responding to one of your most frequent requests, version 8 compiles pickoffs, stolen bases, and caught stealings for pitchers and catchers.
Holds. In addition, we're now compiling Holds for relief pitchers. I'm not very fond of the Hold, because a reliever doesn't have to pitch well to get one, and because it just doesn't seem right to give a reliever a hold and a loss in the same game. (That happens when the reliever puts runners on base, leaves the game with the lead, and is charged with the loss when those runners later score.)
In the end, however, I decided that Holds are useful even if they're not perfect. We all seem to be able to live with the flaws in other pitching stats (e.g. you can get a Win or Quality Start even if you pitch poorly), so why not add Holds and live with their imperfections, too?
The boxscores and scoresheets now list blown saves and holds in addition to the W/L/S stats that you've seen before.
Computer manager options. In version 8, you'll have the ability to choose whether the computer manager (CM) or a human manager handles four different types of decisions -- selection of starting lineups, substitutions, game tactics (swing away, steal, and so on), and running/throwing decisions.
Some of our customers have expressed the view that the game shouldn't ask the manager whether to take an extra base or where a fielder should throw the ball, because in real life these decisions are made by the players or coaches. This new feature allows you to let the game make these decisions for you while retaining control over subs and game tactics.
Others have said that they like have the CM make tactical decisions but prefer to make substitutions themselves. In version 8, you'll be able to do this.
Longer player names. To conserve space on the 80 x 25 screens in the DOS world, we chose to limit player names to 10 characters (short names for screen display, reports, boxscores) or 18 characters (full names). In Windows, we have more freedom to choose fonts and type sizes, so we've expanded the name fields to enable us to store all known player names without abbreviations.
DH-specific saved lineups. With the advent of inter-league play, teams now play some games with the DH and some without. In version 7, the computer manager always chooses the first saved lineup if a lefty is on the mound and the second if a righty is pitching. It then adds or subtracts the DH from the lineup as necessary. But that doesn't give you much control over how to set the lineups for inter-league games, so version 8 adds the ability to save DH and non-DH versions of each of these lineups as well.
Weather. When our weather model was first developed, we thought we were being quite clever when we added logic that would automatically decide to close the roof on a retractable roof stadium whenever it was raining or too cold. It never occurred to us that baseball would put a team in a place where they'd close the roof when it was too HOT. So we've enhanced the weather system to make that decision and to create realistic temperatures for cities like Phoenix where the normal summertime highs are well over 100 degrees.
Schedule templates. Our friends in the commissioners office have made life very difficult for the people who prepare league schedules. At one time, you could count on teams playing each other an equal number of times, with an equal number of home and road games. Now, with three-division leagues, inter-league play, and one league having more teams than the other, these conventions don't work. Today's real-life schedules are unbalanced and include inter-league matchups where all the games are played in one city. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to design a schedule generator that will match what the real-life schedulers are forced to do.
For this reason and others, we've introduced the concept of a schedule template. A schedule template is just like a real schedule but uses dummy team IDs. When you apply this template to a league that you created, your team IDs are substituted for the dummy ones and presto, you've got a working schedule.
Version 8 will include templates for a variety of schedules that you might want to use in your league. We'll include all of the formats that have been used in real life (one 8-team league playing 154 games, one 10-team league playing 162 games, and so on up to today's complex inter-league formats).
Furthermore, you'll be able to create a template from a schedule you've already created. This provides a handy way to move a schedule from one league to another (provided the leagues have the same structure, of course) even if the teams are different.
Schedule editing. We've also added a few features to make it easier to hand-craft your schedules. The most important of these is to copy a block of games. In many league structures, you can put together a balanced schedule that has everyone play everyone else for a period of time, then do it again with the home and road teams reversed. Our block copy command has a "reverse teams" feature that lets you do just this.
Choosing lineups and making substitutions. I've always thought that our lineup screen was a good one -- lots of relevant data a couple of keystrokes away plus handy tools for working with saved lineups and manipulating the batting order. I still feel that way, and we've tried to retain as much of that as we can in the more mouse-oriented Windows world. In addition, we've added some important new features, including these three:
i) a little check box will allow you to toggle between seeing (a) all of the batters or pitchers on your roster and (b) a list of players who are available to enter the game. This is quite handy when you're seeking a pinch hitter, pinch runner, or defensive replacement and need to see who's on the bench.
ii) when working with saved lineups, you get to see the lineups themselves and not just a list of the lineup names. And you can rename these lineups from this window, instead of going over to the manager profile editor to do it.
iii) during a game, you have a chance to undo any mistakes you might make. In version 7, when you inserted a player, he was in the game, period. In version 8, you can make a bunch of moves, then click on the Cancel or Restart button if you decide you made a mistake or simply change your mind. As in real baseball, there is a point of no return -- once you click on OK, it's as if the subs have been announced to the stadium crowd, and you cannot back out at that point.
Dual-role players. Some of you use older seasons that have players who did a significant amount of pitching and playing in the field the same year. To conserve memory and disk space, the game has always allowed only one set of ratings for each player (either batting or pitching), so we've been forced to create two copies of these players. Version 8 allows a player to have a full set of ratings for both roles, so we'll be able to do a better job with these older players and with the handful of modern position players who are occasionally used as emergency pitchers.
There's lots more to talk about, but this is already getting pretty long, so I'm going to stop here and resume the discussion in the next newsletter. Thanks for reading.
]]>August 12, 1999
Written by Tom Tippett
Welcome to the third edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site (www.diamond-mind.com).
If you don't wish to receive these messages in the future, please send an email response with the subject line "unsubscribe". We'll immediately remove your email address from the list. And if you know someone who would like to subscribe to this newsletter, we'll be happy to add them to the mailing list if they send us an email message with the subject line "subscribe" and their name and street address in the body of the message.
Topics for this issue:
New baseball articles
Boxscore search engine
Version 8 news
As many of you know, ESPN.com has been publishing articles written by Diamond Mind staff for the past 16 months. Although we rarely write from a fantasy baseball perspective, our relationship is with their fantasy news staff, so whenever we write something new, it's posted on their fantasy baseball news page for a few days. Sometimes you'll see also a link to the article from their main baseball page.
During the season, our schedule is irregular -- we post something when we've got something to say or when we've completed an interesting research project of some sort -- with 5-6 articles coming out during each season.
During the coming off-season, we'll once again be posting a series of 30 articles reviewing the performance of each team and its 20-25 key players. You'll be able to find them on our web site and ESPN.com starting in late November. And next March, we'll release our annual season preview article.
Our two most recent articles were posted in July, and you can find them at www.diamond-mind.com by scrolling most of the way down our home page and clicking on the Baseball Articles link.
The first article offered some thoughts on the career leader boards, examined the growing number of low-pitch-count outings by starting pitchers, takes MLB to task for how they handled the revision to Hack Wilson's RBI record, and talks about my experience at the Jose Jimenez no-hitter in late June.
The second article starts with a look at each team's record in games against the stronger and weaker teams in the first half of the season and ends with a few random thoughts about the year to date.
Two Diamond Mind customers, Ron Gudykunst and Tom Milne, teamed up earlier this year to write a terrific program that searches Diamond Mind boxscores (version 7, both expanded and newspaper formats) and gives you access to all sorts of interesting information about the best and worst performances by players and teams. I don't have anywhere near enough room to tell you about all of its features here, so I'll simply say that I'm impressed with its power, flexibility and speed.
It runs on Windows, it's free, and you can download it from:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tdmilne
As you might expect, we've been getting a lot of questions about version 8. For several good reasons, we've been saying nothing more than we're working on it and it's going to be our first Windows version of the game.
Why have we been so reluctant to talk about it? Five reasons, mainly.
First, I believe very strongly that it is dishonest to sell something that doesn't exist. And version 8 doesn't really exist in any meaningful sense until we've actually built and debugged and documented and field tested it.
Second, every minute we spend talking about the next version or answering questions about it is a minute that we're not actually working on the product. And we think you'll get the most value for your money if we're spending most of our time working, not talking.
Third, I think it's bad business to hype upcoming products. I've seen a lot of companies create a frenzy of anticipation for a new release, only to be under so much pressure to ship that they end up scrapping promised features or releasing a buggy product. Nobody wins when that happens.
Fourth, there are certain things we're working on that we don't want our competitors to know about just yet. This is actually one of the less important reasons, but it is a factor, and I wouldn't be telling the whole truth if I didn't include it.
Finally, it helps control the rumor mill. Last month, for example, someone posted a totally fictitious account of a conversation they claimed to have had with a non-existent member of our staff. Many of you knew that we had said that our web site and newsletter would be the only official sources of information about version 8, so we were able to contain that rumor quickly.
On the other hand, there are a couple of very good reasons for beginning to talk about the new release now. Many of you run leagues or play in them, and if we won't talk about version 8, you're missing some information you may need to plan your next league season. And many of our non-league customers have been great supporters of our work for many years, and I feel that you have a right to know something about what we're up to.
So we're going to start releasing information about version 8, but we'll try to do it in a controlled fashion that gives you what you need to make decisions without venturing into the land of wishful thinking and marketing hype. We won't talk about features until they've been thoroughly tested, and we'll be cautious about our projections for the ship date.
Talking about version 8 creates a dilemma for someone who's interested in the game. Do you buy version 7 now, allowing you to begin playing the game right away, but taking a chance that we'll ship version 8 next week. Or do you wait until version 8 is ready to save the cost of an upgrade?
To make this decision easier, we've always offered free or discounted upgrades for a period of time before a new version is released. And I'm happy to announce that our free/discounted upgrade policy was put in effect on July 30, 1999. Here's how it works:
- anyone buying version 7 for the first time receives a free upgrade
to version 8 when it is ready
- anyone upgrading to version 7 from an earlier version will receive a $15
credit toward the purchase of a version 8 upgrade
Please understand that I'm not suggesting that you buy version 7 now if what you really want is version 8. If that describes you, I recommend that you wait and evaluate version 8 when it's ready. On the other hand, if you've been holding off on version 7 because you're afraid we'll make your investment obsolete by releasing version 8, fear not.
We know that each of you has made an investment in our season disks, and some of you worry that we might make that investment obsolete with the release of a new version. That's why we have always included a conversion feature in every new upgrade. Version 7, for example, automatically converts season disks from formats as far back as version 2 (which was released in 1988).
We have already written and tested the code that converts disks from version 7 format to version 8, and we plan to convert from older formats as well. But I have serious doubts about whether it still makes sense to go all the way back to version 2. Disks in these early formats are missing information that we routinely include today, so even if we built an automatic conversion for those disks, they'd still be inferior to the seasons we current ship.
Instead, suppose we build version 8 to convert from all formats as far back as version 5, and we offer you the chance to trade in any disks in older formats for the version 8 equivalent at $3 per disk plus our normal shipping charges. This would mean that the vast majority (probably well over 90%) of season disks that are out there would be converted automatically at no cost to you, since they're already in version 5, 6 or 7 format. And you'd have an inexpensive way to move to a newer and better version of the others.
If you disagree with this approach, I'd like to hear from you. If a good case is made, we'll make sure version 8 handles all formats back to version 2. If not, we'll direct that energy into new features or getting the new version out sooner.
Our work on version 8 doesn't mean version 7 is going away. We will continue to sell and support version 7, and we'll produce new season disks in version 7 format for the forseeable future.
In particular, we will be releasing the 1999 Season Disk and the 2000 Projection Disk in version 7 format on our normal schedule (December and March respectively).
When version 8 is ready, we will release updated editions of both disks that take advantage of new features in version 8. Purchasers of the version 7 editions of these disks will automatically get these updates at no charge with their purchase of a version 8 upgrade.
None of this is new, by the way. We had the same policy in place when versions 6 and 7 were released. And even if version 8 was shipping today, we'd be releasing both disks in version 7 format, because we don't believe in forcing you to buy an upgrade in order to use the new season disks.
I'd love to be able to announce a firm ship date for version 8, but I can't do that yet. Until we get more of the work done, and until we successfully make it through the first round of field testing, we won't know for sure when we'll be finished. And because this is our first Windows release, we are planning a longer-than-normal field testing cycle.
I can say, however, that our target is a spring 2000 release. This is not a guarantee, because I can't give you one right now. We will not ship the product until it's been rigorously tested and we feel it's ready for prime time.
Version 8 might be shipping now if our goal was to get the version 7 feature set into a Windows version as quickly as possible. That would be something like taking an older house and putting a fresh coat of paint on it.
But we wanted to do much more than that. We wanted to keep the things that are great about the old house and move them into a thoroughly modern building that will support our plans for years to come.
So we've adopted a more powerful database technology that will enable us to do much more than we could with our old file system. We're completely rethinking the user interface to make good use of toolbars, popup menus, drag and drop, tabbed windows, online help and other modern tools for making things easier to find and to use. We've increased the power of our play-by-play engine and added lots of new commentary to the play-by-play library.
It's safe to say that we've added new features to just about every part of the game that we've touched so far. The most frequently-used areas of the product (game play, autoplay, league management, reporting) are better than 80% complete. As these components begin to approach 100%, we'll provide more details. But it would be a little premature to do so now.
Version 8 will run on Windows95 and its successors. It will not run on Windows 3.1. We've chosen this course because we feel we can build a much better product if we focus solely on the 32-bit environment and if we take advantage of the newest user interface elements. Our goal is to run on Windows/NT and Windows2000 as well, but we haven't yet tested the game in these environments.
It's too early to know what the memory and disk space requirements will be, but we always try to keep the game as small and efficient as possible.
As you might expect, we've had a lot of requests from people wishing to be involved in field testing this new version, and we cannot possibly accept everyone. We hate to say no to people who are trying to help us, but it does nobody any good if we're so swamped with the logistics of communicating with the testers that we can't get our work done.
When we're ready for more volunteers, we'll announce it through this newsletter. At that time, we'll describe the mix of people and computers we think would provide for the most effective field test coverage, so those of you who wish to volunteer can then tell us about your interests and your computer. With that information, we'll select a group of people who we believe can provide the most thorough test of the game and it's ability to run on different computers.
We're doing our best to build a great product for you and we can't wait to show you what we've done so far. In the meantime, we'll use our web site and this newsletter to bring you periodic updates.
As many of you know, we're always interested in hearing from you. A lot of what's good about Diamond Mind Baseball sprang from suggestions made by customers. And the sooner we hear of any idea, the sooner we can start thinking about how to integrate it into the product, even if it's too late to get it into the very next release.
Please understand, however, that we're entering a period that will be the busiest we've ever experienced, with the release of two new season disks and a new game upgrade. We'll read all of your suggestions, but we won't have time to respond with more than a polite thank you. And if you send us a message asking whether features A, B and C will be in version 8, we'll politely refer you to our web site and back issues of the newsletter. I'm afraid we have no other choice.
We will, of course, continue to provide our normal levels of technical support for version 7, so please don't shy away from seeking the help you need. Your questions about version 7 and our current catalog of season disks will continue to be answered promptly.
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