Diamond Mind Email Newsletter

December 18, 2003
Written by Tom Tippett

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2003. 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:

2003 Season Disk now shipping
Tips for using the 2003 Season Disk
1992 Deluxe Past Season now with transactions and lineups
New articles
Intro price for All-time Greatest Players expires 12/31/2003
Update -- version 9 and the 2004 Projection Disk
Official rules

2003 Season Disk now shipping

We're happy to report that we began shipping the 2003 Season Disk on schedule last week. All of the advance orders were on their way by December 12th and we are now back to our normal shipping schedule.

Tips for using the 2003 Season Disk

Here are a few tips regarding the use of this season disk:

1. We have prepared notes that you can view through the Notes page of the Organizer window. We recommend that you take some time to read them in the relatively near future, as they contain useful information that may answer questions you might have about using the season disk, the statistics and ratings on the disk, and what you can expect when you start playing games with it.

2. The 2003 Season Disk is shipped with the real-life transactions and game-by-game starting lineups feature turned on, real-life opening day rosters (meaning that players who were disabled on opening day in real life are also disabled on this season disk), and the "as-played" 2003 schedule installed. By "as-played", we mean that postponed games are listed on the dates they were actually played.

The use of real-life transactions and lineups requires that the rosters and schedule be exactly as they were in real-life. Feel free to change rosters or switch to the original ("as-scheduled") schedule, but if you do, remember to change the settings in your organization or league so the use of real-life transactions and lineups is turned off.

3. The season disk includes multiple player records for anyone who appeared with more than one team this year. These players have one record for each team and one combined record that reflects their overall performance.

If you wish to release all players into free agency and draft new rosters from scratch, start by using the "Release all players" command and then use "Delete team-specific records". Both commands can be found on the Tools menu.

If you don't run the "Delete team-specific records" command, these multi-team players will be drafted more than once. And this command must be used AFTER releasing the players, because it deletes those team-specific records from the list of free agents, not from team rosters.

4. If you ran a draft league using our 2002 Season Disk, remember that you can use the Migrate command on the File menu to automatically set up the 2003 Season Disk with the structure of your league and your team rosters. See the DMB help system for more information on how to use the Migrate feature.

If you use Migrate, remember that:

a) the "source" database is your 2002 league database and your "target" database is the 2003 Season Disk. (You can install the 2003 Season Disk more than once if you want to migrate your league to one copy and have another with the real-life rosters still intact.)

b) Migrate does not assign home parks to each team, so you'll have to do that yourself.

c) When Migrate is placing a multi-team player on a roster, it's the combined record that is used. His team-specific records for the 2003 season are placed in the free agent pool. Use the "Delete team-specific records" command on the Tools menu to remove them before running a draft.

d) Migrate does not create manager profiles, so you'll need to generate new ones or use the "Roster / manager profile" window to set them up the way you want before playing games.

5. Before starting a season, take a look at the organization and leagues options. The disk ships with the generation of game-by-game stats turned on, but game accounts, boxscores and scoresheets turned off.

If you want faster autoplay results and you don't care about being able to look at batting logs, pitching logs, or reports based on time intervals, turn off the generation of game-by-game stats.

If you run a league and you're planning to use the Transfer features to exchange game results, statistics, and manager profiles with the managers in that league, you'll need to turn on the generation of game accounts.

And you may want to turn on the automatic generation of boxscores and scoresheets.

6. If you plan to set up a pair of leagues whose champions will meet in a "world series" at the end of your postseason, remember to create an organization to link those leagues BEFORE your season begins. DMB won't allow you to create an organization after the season starts, and you'll need that organization in place to take full advantage of the game's support for postseason play.

1992 Deluxe Past Season now with transactions and lineups

For the 1992 Deluxe Past Season, we have added a complete set of player transactions (trades, disabled list moves, promotions, demotions, suspensions and more) and actual starting lineups for every game in the schedule. If you are a registered owner of these season disks, you may be eligible for free upgrades or special upgrade prices. See our season disk upgrade page for more information on our policies.

New articles

In November and December, we added these new articles to our web site:

- a list of all of the players who made their big-league debuts this season, along with their batting or pitching stats for 2003

- our annual review of the Gold Glove selections

- a look at team efficiency during the 2003 season ... how well each team converted batting events into runs, how well each team prevented its opponents from doing the same, and how team run differentials compared with their win-loss records

In the next week or two, we expect to publish two more articles that we've been working on recently:

- a recap of the preseason predictions that were made by various pundits and publications, along with accuracy rankings for 2003 and for the past several seasons ... by the way, our 2003 projections of team win-loss records were our best ever by a good margin

- an evaluation of the offensive production each team received from players at each position, providing an interesting look at each team's offensive strengths and weaknesses

To find them, click on the "Baseball Articles" link that appears in the banner at the top of our web pages.

Intro price for All-time Greatest Players expires 12/31/2003

Since we released our All-time Greatest Players disk in June, it has become one of the most popular season disks we've ever offered, and until the end of the December it's still available for the special introductory price of $24.95. After that, the regular price of $29.95 will be in effect.

In the next couple of weeks, we'll be posting eleven new historical park images to our web site. You can assign these images to the parks on the All-time Greatest Players disk that are currently associated with our generic park image.

These new images will be available as free downloads from the park image section of our web site, which has instructions for downloading these images and assigning them to parks in your DMB databases.

Update -- version 9 and the 2004 Projection Disk

Although most of our attention has been focused on the 2003 Season Disk for the past couple of months, we've been making good progress on version 9 and the 2004 Projection Disk at the same time.

Version 9 has been in beta test for several weeks. There have been bugs, of course, but we're making good progress on those fixes. And we've received a lot of positive feedback about the main features in this release -- internet play, generating groups of reports, league web site generation, and the improved play-by-play commentary. We haven't yet made the new encyclopedia feature available to the beta testers, but that will happen very soon.

Assuming we don't run into unexpected problems during the remainder of the beta test period, we plan to begin shipping version 9 in the second half of February.

The 2004 Projection Disk will begin shipping on March 11th with our customary update to follow in early April.

Pricing for both of these products will be announced when we begin taking advance orders in late January.

Official rules

The Diamond Mind Baseball community is one of the most knowledgable groups of baseball fans we know of. Still, we're occasionally asked about rules such as who gets the win when the starter doesn't go five innings, when saves can and can't be awarded, assigning runs and earned runs in innings with multiple pitchers, and the implications of making certain moves involving the designated hitter and/or the pitcher.

The official rules of baseball are available online at this address:

http://mlb.mlb.com/NASapp/mlb/mlb/official_info/official_rules/foreword.jsp

(Yes, the address really is that long and repetitive, but you can also find this page via the main MLB.com page by clicking on the "Official Info" link that appears just above the legal fine print at the bottom of the page.)

The statistical rules (wins, saves, assigning runs) are in section 10.00, which has the title "Official Scorer". The DH rules are covered in section 6.10.