All-time Greatest Players Disk

Last updated: July 20, 2006

The All-time Greatest Players Disk gives you a great way to play games using more than 1750 of the best players in baseball history, including many stars who are active today.

All of the players have been selected and rated based on their best series of peak seasons (more on this below), with each season evaluated relative to the norms for that era and adjusted for park effects. The players are organized into 48 teams based on the real-life franchises they were most closely affiliated with during their peak periods.

Everything is in place to allow you to start playing games the moment you install the disk, but remember that there's almost no limit on the ways you can use these players and teams. You can also run a draft, restructure the league, generate a new schedule, change the manager profiles, and move players and teams to/from other Diamond Mind season disks.

2006 edition

Our All-time Greatest Players Disk was first released in the summer of 2003. In July, 2006, we're releasing a major upgrade to this product, one that includes the following improvements:

• more than 630 new players, including players from the 1876-1893 period and many more modern-day relief specialists
  
• 16 new teams, bringing the total to 48 teams that are organized into two leagues with 24 teams each
  
• the additional players allowed us to create teams for some real-life franchises that had to be combined on the 2003 disk ... Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Los Angeles (A), Baltimore, Oakland, and San Francisco now have enough players to stand alone
  
• updated rosters and manager profiles for every team
  
• updated batting and pitching stats for players who appeared in the 2003-2005 seasons
  
• reduced threshold for obtaining a rating at a defensive position, so some players who appear on both editions will have an additional position or two on the 2006 disk
  
• added 16 historical parks, all with park images that can be downloaded at no charge
  
• updated the park factors for modern parks to include the 2003-2005 seasons
  
• two schedules, one balanced schedule that provides 160 games per team and another unbalanced schedule with 162 games per team

Availability, pricing, and upgrades

The All-time Greatest Players Disk is priced at $29.95.

Registered owners of the 2003 edition of this disk can order the 2006 edition a reduced price of $17.95.

Note: We realize that this is higher than our usual season disk upgrade prices. That's because this upgrade is far more extensive than the others we've done. We've increased the number of players by more than 55% and completely redone other aspects of the disk. The work involved was only slightly less extensive than it is for a totally new product.

Anyone who purchased the 2003 edition after January 1, 2006, is entitled to free upgrade on request.

Organizing the teams

The players are organized into teams based primarily on real-life franchises. Certain franchises (e.g. New York, Boston, Chicago) have too many stars for one team, so we split them into two or three. Other franchises are too young to have accumulated a full and balanced roster, so we combined them.

Every team has a manager profile with starting rotations, bullpen assignments, starting lineups against left- and right-handed pitchers for both DH and non-DH games, and depth charts for each of those starting lineups.

During our testing, we autoplayed a number of seasons and found these teams to be remarkably balanced. Some are better than others, of course, but it was rare to see a team with a winning percentage above .600 or below .400. Most of the divisional races were hotly contested, often decided during the season's final series.

Player ratings

We rated the players based on their best series of consecutive peak years that met a minimum playing time threshold. Let's take a moment to go over what that means.

To select each player's best series of seasons, we began with his rookie year, collected enough future seasons to meet or exceed our minimum playing time threshold, and evaluated that group of seasons. We repeated the process for the seasons beginning with his second year, then his third year, and so on. The group of seasons that provided the highest level of league- and park-adjusted performance became the basis for that player's ratings.

We used consecutive peak seasons rather than unconnected peak seasons because players change with age. A player may start out as a superior fielder with great speed and enough hitting skills to be an asset at the top of the order. As he matures, adds muscle, or recovers from a serious injury, he might move to a less demanding fielding position, run less, take more walks, and add power. If we rated such a player based on a mix of early, middle, and later years, we might end up creating a power hitter who could also play great defense and steal bases, even if that player never did all of those things at the same time at any point in his career.

We chose to use peak years rather than entire careers because some all-time greats had mediocre-to-poor seasons at the start or end of their careers because they were called up at a very young age and/or they kept their jobs after they had lost much of their ability. If we used entire careers, these stars would not stand out from the crowd as much as they should.

We felt it was important to include a lot of playing time. That way, lesser players with one or two really good seasons wouldn't rank as highly as others who sustained their success over a much longer period.

If a position player had a short career -- less than 4000 plate appearances -- he's not eligible for this disk. If he reached that threshold but fell short of 6000 PA, we used his entire career. If he exceeded 6000 PA, we used his best run of consecutive seasons that include at least 6000 PA.

Similarly, we had two thresholds for pitchers. To qualify for the disk, a pitcher needed at least 200 career starts, 400 career relief appearances, or a suitable combination of the two. To qualify for the peak-years treatment, those limits were raised to 250 starts or 500 relief appearances.

This approach favors players with longer careers because their weaker seasons are excluded. We feel that's appropriate. The best players start sooner and last longer than everyone else.

Some active players fell just short of qualifying for this disk. We plan to release future editions that include players who have reached these thresholds for the first time and update the projected statistics for active players who have added to their resumes.

This disk does not include players from the Negro Leagues who didn't also play in the majors. There are two major reasons for this. First, the statistical records from the Negro Leagues are nowhere near as complete as they are from the majors. And, second, it is difficult to assess the quality of the Negro Leagues relative to the majors and to make a appropriate adjustments when evaluating those Negro League stats. We hope to add Negro League players in a future update to this disk.