Season Database Notes

Those of you who have been customers of Diamond Mind for a while will recognize that some of the material in these notes changes very little from year to year.

These topics are covered in this note:

• Copyright notices
• License agreement
• Database contents
• Real-Life Transactions, Game-by-Game Lineups, and Schedules
• Parks and Weather Information
• The Accuracy of Real-life Statistics Real-life
• Salaries
• Holds and blown saves
• Parting Thought

Copyright notices

Much of the statistical data in this product was compiled using files downloaded from Retrosheet.org. The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

This document and all other information in this Season Database are the copyrighted property of Diamond Mind, Inc. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of Diamond Mind is strictly prohibited.

License agreement

Please read this license agreement carefully. Use of Diamond Mind Baseball("the Software") and related Season Databases constitutes your acceptance of these terms and conditions and your agreement to abide by them.

The Software and Seasons are protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties.

This license agreement grants you the nonexclusive right to use this Season Database for personal and recreational use. Commercial use of this Season Database is not permitted. You may not rent or lease this Season Database.

You are authorized to make backup copies of this Season Database for thesole purpose of protecting your investment. You may transfer the Season Database freely from one computer to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used by two people in two places at the same time.

If you administer or play in a league that uses Diamond Mind Baseball and this Season Database, you are authorized to distribute copies of this Season Database to other league members, PROVIDED YOU FIRST RECEIVE CONFIRMATION FROM DIAMOND MIND THAT EACH AND EVERY PERSON TO WHOM YOU ARE MAKING THE DATABASE AVAILABLE IS A REGISTERED OWNER OF THE DIAMOND MIND BASEBALL GAME AND THIS Season Database. Distributing this Season Database in any other fashion is a violation of our copyright and is strictly prohibited.

You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this license agreement provided you retain no copies and the recipient agrees to the terms of this license agreement.

This Season Database is provided "as-is" without warranty of any kind. Diamond Mind will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential, indirect, or similar damages.

Database contents

We have created player records for everyone who appeared in the big leagues this season, including:

• basic player facts: names, batting and throwing hands, birthdates
• official batting and pitching statistics, including left/right splits
• fielding statistics by position
• games started at each position against left- and right-handed pitchers
• thousands of player ratings that you can see: injury, bunting, range, running, throwing, and so on
• thousands more player ratings that you can't see: the event tables and pitch-by-pitch ratings that make the game produce accurate results
• opening day rosters for every team, plus a complete set of real-life transactions, and
• real-life starting lineups for every game played this season

If a player appeared on more than one team in real life, we have created a player record for each team (for people who do season replays using the real rosters) plus a combined record (for use in draft leagues). The combined records appear in the free agent listings.

Real-Life Transactions, Game-by-Game Lineups, and Schedules

As you know, inter-league play is a fact of life in this era, and this season database has been prepared accordingly. There is a single schedule that includes both games within leagues and inter-league games, and it is no longer possible to simulate one league at a time.

We have compiled a complete set of real-life transactions (trades, promotions and demotions, disabled list moves, and so on) and game-by- game starting lineups. If you play seasons using the real-life rosters and schedule, Diamond Mind Baseball will process real-life transactions on the appropriate dates and will choose the real-life starting lineups for each game.

NOTE: If you want to change the real-life rosters in any way, either by moving one or two players around or by drafting entirely new teams, you'll need to modify the settings for your league or organization to turn off the use of real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups. Those transactions and lineups are meaningless once you change the rosters.

To make all this work, the league schedule shows games when they were actually played. (We call this the "as-played" schedule.) If, for example, a game was originally scheduled for April, but was rained out and replayed in September, it shows up on the schedule in September. That's the only way to do it, since the starting lineups for a game in September might include a player who was not on the roster on the original April date. (One exception: if there was a tie game, that game is not included in the schedule since it is replayed later most of the time.)

Because some of you might like to use the original schedule, we've included two of them. (We call these "as-scheduled" schedule, because all games are listed on the dates when they were originally scheduled.) You can find them on the Schedules tab in the Organizer window and they're available to be assigned to your organization.

NOTE: If you switch to the as-scheduled schedule, remember to turn off the use of real-life transactions and lineups.

Parks and Weather Information

As we do each year, we have updated the ballpark information to reflect changes in the physical characteristics of the parks, their statistical impact on offense, and the weather patterns for the current season.

For seasons prior to the mid-1990s, we do not have access to weather information for each of the games played that year, so the ballparks have weather settings matching those from the 1990s (if the stadium is still in use) or standard values (if we have nothing else to go on).

Beginning with the release of Diamond Mind Baseball version 8 in 2000, we began supplying scale drawings of each park that are displayed on the main game window. These images are quite large, and most of them don't change from year to year, so we don't include them when we ship a season database. You can download any new and updated park images from our web site (www.diamond-mind.com) at no charge.

The Accuracy of Real-life Statistics

As always, this Season Database is the product of extensive research into player performance. Using detailed information, we compile batting, pitching and fielding statistics.

After years of compiling and licensing statistics from the leading statistics companies, we have learned that there is not always 100% agreement on the official stats and various breakdowns. Small differences often exist in the data published by different companies and by baseball's official statisticians.

You might find it surprising that it's not always clear which way a player bats or throws. Most of these cases don't matter much, since the majority involve relief pitchers who rarely or never batted during the season. But sometimes an important player is hard to pin down. It's not all that unusual to find a player listed as a switch-hitter in the team's media guide and as a right-handed batter on baseball web sites.

As a result of the work we do in this area, our batting hand info and our left/right splits might differ slightly from those on various web sites. We believe our information is at least as good as any other source you might use.

In our experience, fielding stats get less attention than batting and pitching stats when it comes to finding and correcting mistakes. There are always small differences between the fielding statistics published by STATS (supplier to many major web sites) and the official statistics. As far as we know, no player is off by more than one in any category, so none of the differences will have any impact on player performance in your DMB games.

The bottom line is that if you see a small difference between the stats we publish and your favorite book or web site, don't be surprised. Of course, if the difference is significant, please let us know so we can research it and make any necessary correction if it turns out that the error is in our data.

Real-life Salaries

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 database migration feature.

But we were asked by quite a few of our customers to add the real-life salary information anyway. And that's what we've been doing for many years.

Many real-life player contracts have special provisions for bonuses, incentive clauses, and deferred compensation. So it's not always obvious how to come up with a single number that represents a player's actual salary. The figures in our database are base salaries for the current season.

Many players who were called up during the season are minor-leaguers with little or no major league service time, so it's usually safe to assume they're making the minimum if we can't find evidence to the contrary.

Holds and blown saves

These statistics are not part of the official rules of baseball, so the various companies that produce the statistics and boxscores that you see in the press and on web sites are free to define these any way they like.

In part because STATS was the first to come up with these ideas, the software that we use to compile pitching stats uses definitions that are very similar to those behind the numbers supplied by STATS to their customers. But those definitions are not exactly the same, so our numbers don't quite match the ones published by STATS.

Generally speaking, STATS awards a hold whenever a reliever enters the game in a save situation and holds the lead until another reliever takes over. But they don't award a hold when the reliever enters the game in the middle innings, even though the reliever is entitled to a save if he holds the lead through the end of the game and pitches effectively for at least three innings. And they don't charge a reliever with a blown save when he enters the game that early, either.

Parting Thought

We put a significant effort into our Season Database each year -- slogging through reference sources to track down batting and throwing hand discrepancies, compiling stats and checking them against other sources, entering and checking thousands of player transactions, and poring over thousands of pages of analytical data and player notes to come up with what we believe are highly accurate player ratings.

We hope you are pleased with the results, and thanks again for choosing to play Diamond Mind Baseball.