DMB News November 2000

Diamond Mind Email Newsletter #11

November 21, 2000
Written by Tom Tippett

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2000. 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 website.

Topics for this issue:

Version 8 update
2000 Season Disk update
2000 debut players
Baseball articles

Version 8 update

We're happy to report that we have only a few minor bugs to fix before version 8 will be ready, so we're just a few days away from beginning the process of making the CDs.

Unfortunately, we must also report that the projected ship date for version 8 has slipped by about a week to ten days and will now be in the first half of December. The exact ship date depends on how long it takes to manufacture the CDs, and the manufacturer cannot give us a specific date until the job is underway.

The delay is partly due to the fact that it's going to take a few days longer than we expected to get the CDs back from the duplicator after we deliver them the final version of the software. It turns out that this is their busiest season, so turnaround times are longer than we expected this time of year. We should have done a better job of nailing this down before announcing the late-November ship date, and for that we apologize.

The other reason for the delay is a decision we made to add several useful new features for post-season play. Those tasks added 3-4 days to the schedule, but we think you'll find that it was worth the wait. These new capabilities are described in the Version 8 Guided Tour on our web site, and we encourage you to check it out for the full story. Here's a capsule summary:

- when the regular season ends, you select the teams that will compete in the post season and determine the matchups

- you can use a new feature in the schedule generator to quickly add the next round of post-season games to your schedule

- when you play those games interactively or via autoplay, a new bracket-style display shows you the status of these post-season series

- when a team clinches a series, DMB automatically cancels any remaining games of the series and advances the winning team to the next round

We apologize again for not doing our homework more thoroughly on the CD duplication schedule, and we hope that you will agree with our decision to take a few days to add the post-season features.

2000 Season Disk update

We've been making very good progress on the 2000 Season Disk, and we are on schedule to begin shipping it on December 14th, as previously announced.

2000 debut players

As we do each year at this time, we have posted a report on our web site that lists batting and pitching stats for players who reached the big leagues for the first time in the 2000 season. If you're in a DMB league, this may help you get started on your planning for the next rookie draft.

Baseball articles

We haven't had time to some of the writing we normally do this time of year, but we haven't forgotten about those projects either.

We usually post an article showing how the various pre-season predictions stacked up against the real thing. Even though our results weren't nearly as good this year, we still plan to write this article. It'll just have to wait until our commitments on version 8 and the 2000 Season Disk have been fulfilled.

And we're looking forward to writing my annual commentary on the Gold Glove awards, especially since the voters had a particularly bad year this year, in our humble opinion. But that will have to wait a while for the same reasons.

If we don't get buried by the need to provide technical support on version 8 and the 2000 Season Disk, we'll be publishing our annual series of team reviews again this year. In the past, we've done two per week for fifteen weeks, starting around the end of November. This year, assuming we go ahead with them, we expect to do three per week starting in late December.

Tom