Diamond Mind Baseball

Play-by-play Suggestion Form

You can use this form to submit ideas for the Diamond Mind Baseball play-by-play library. With your help, we can make the commentary in the game more interesting, more varied, and more relevant.

You can submit your ideas in two ways: fill out the form below and click on the Submit button or send email to pbp@diamond-mind.com. The email option is preferred if you want to submit a lot of play descriptions; in that case, consider creating a Word document and sending it to us as an attachment.

Goals

Our primary goal at the moment is to collect play descriptions that are unique to specific ballparks -- modern parks and historical parks -- but feel free to make other play-by-play suggestions as well.

Guidelines

Before submitting play-by-play suggestions, please take a moment to review the guidelines below. They include some tips that should save you time while providing us with the information in the most helpful way:

our play-by-play engine makes extensive use of alternative phrases that say the same thing in different ways. We might, for instance, have twelve different ways to describe a line drive to the gap in left field. When you submit a play description, we'll add synonyms wherever we feel they are appropriate, so you don't need to submit the same basic play many times just to add variety.

to maintain suspense, we like to have more than one outcome for each basic type of batted ball. A grounder in the hole might go through for a single, be fumbled for an error, or be fielded cleanly. You don't need to submit these variations; we'll take your idea and create a related family of play descriptions when we add it to our library.

our engine allows us to restrict plays to specific parks, players, game situations, tactics, and even time periods. If the suggested play cannot be used in all situations and you don't think the restrictions are self-evident, spell them out.

our system can display just about any piece of information -- player and team statistics, park data (such as the height of the wall in the right-field corner), whether a hitter bats right or left, and much more -- in the commentary. Feel free to include such information in your play descriptions.

it's better to use place-holders rather than specific player names so we know which fielder and baserunner you're referring to. For example: "high fly ball to the gap in right ... <cf> and <rf> are in the vicinity ... and <cf> drops the ball! ... <batter> is going for two ..."

we'll need to break long descriptions into individual lines, so please put a marker such as ... where you want the text to be broken

don't worry too much about grammar, punctuation, and spelling; we'll take care of that when we enter these plays into our library

we may not be able to use your suggestions exactly as written; we'll do our best to do so, but we might need to tweak some things to make them fit into the structure of our system or to take advantage of existing library elements

we can't promise to put every suggestion into the game; some may require capabilities our engine doesn't currently have, some may be duplicates of other submissions, some may not fit our style because they are too corny or for some other reason. If anyone submits a lot of plays that we don't think we'll ever use, we'll let them know so they don't spend time doing more of the same.

Examples

For park-specific plays, please use details so we can really capture the flavor of that park. Consider the following plays that are appropriate for Fenway Park:

"there's a drive ... down the right-field line ... hooking ... HOME RUN! ... into the second row of seats ... just a couple of feet past Pesky's Pole"

"belted deep and on a line to left ... off the Green Monster ... about half way up ... <lf> plays the carom ... holding <batter> to a single ... on a ball that would have been out of just about every other park"

"high and deep to right ... <rf> goes back ... he's on the track ... and runs out of room ... as the ball lands about six feet into the Boston bullpen" (restriction: applies only after the bullpens were added in 1940)

"high fly ball ... left-field line ... <lf> angling back to the corner ... and makes the catch right in front of the 310-foot sign"

"line drive to deep left-center ... splits the gap ... one-hops the scoreboard ... <cf> has it ... fires it back in ... but not before <batter> coasts into second with a stand-up double"

Turn-around time

We add lots of new play-by-play commentary whenever we release a major upgrade to the game but not in patches that we release between versions. So the first opportunity to see a play you submit will be the next major upgrade.

In addition, it takes time to enter plays in the structure required by our play-by-play system. If we receive a lot of suggestions, we may have trouble keeping up. We'll include as many of your ideas as time permits, and what we don't get to now will be considered for a future release.

Submission form

To submit a play description, please fill out the following information and press the SUBMIT button.

Your name and email address are optional. We'd prefer that you include them so we can acknowledge your contributions and contact you with any feedback or questions about your submissions. But you can remain anonymous if you like.