Season Disk Features

Last updated: July 15, 2005

All Diamond Mind Baseball season disks include everything you need to begin playing highly-realistic games and/or organizing fantasy leagues the moment you install them -- team rosters, a large pool of players with detailed ratings and statistics, league schedules, ballpark ratings, and so on.

Complete team rosters. With the exception of a few players on a few of our Classic Past Seasons, all season disks include everyone who appeared in a big-league game. Those exceptions involve a small number of players who rarely played and had almost no impact on their teams.

Combined players. If a player appeared on more than one real-life team, we generally create one player record for each of his teams and one combined record. The team-specific records are used for detailed season replays using real-life rosters; the combined record is used for leagues that draft new rosters. With the exception of a few players on a few of our Classic Past Seasons, all of our season disks include combined records for all multi-team players.

Leagues. Every disk is set up with one or more leagues. In most cases, that means putting the teams into their real-life leagues. For greatest teams disks, we use a fictional league.

Schedules. Every disk includes at least one set of league schedules. In most cases, we include the real-life "as-played" schedules for the two leagues. An as-played schedule shows all games on the dates they were actually played, reflecting rainouts and other changes.

The "as-played" schedule is meaningless for Projection Disks because those disks are released prior to the start of the season. Instead, we include the schedule as it was published before the season. The Current Season Disk and some recent Deluxe Past Seasons also include the "as-scheduled" version as an alternative that you can install.

With greatest teams disks, we supply a fictional schedule involving those teams.

Parks. Every disk contains detailed information about the home parks for the teams on that disk. The park information includes physical details (such as wall distances and heights, size of foul territory, playing surface), weather information (temperature, rain frequency, wind strength and direction), and statistical park factors.

Real-life batting statistics. All season disks include a full set of real-life batting statistics, including all of the categories set out in the official rule book.

Real-life pitching statistics. All season disks include an extensive set of real-life pitching statistics, including all of the categories set out in the official rule book. The Current Season Disk and Deluxe Past Seasons also include a number of modern pitching statistics such as holds, blown saves, opposition stolen bases, inherited runners, and run support.

Real-life fielding statistics. All season disks include real-life fielding statistics, broken down by position. For the Current Season Disk and Deluxe Past Seasons, these statistics include games, games started, defensive innings, putouts, assists, errors, double plays, fielding percentage, and passed balls, plus three modern stats for catchers, passed balls, stolen bases allowed, caught stealing, and pickoffs.

Some Classic and Greatest Teams disks are missing the data for games, games started, and double plays. None of the classic seasons include defensive innings or the catcher stealing and pickoff information.

Our Projection Disks do not include projected fielding statistics. Fielding performance in DMB is based on defensive ratings, not fielding stats, so any projected statistics would be for show and would have no impact on the results of your games.

Real-life left/right splits. The Current Season Disk, Projection Disk, and Deluxe Past Seasons include complete left/right splits for all batters and pitchers. Performance in DMB games is based on these splits.

For Classic Past Seasons, left/right splits are not available in the historical record, so we give each player a standard left/right advantage based on the results of a multi-year study we conducted. This way, left/right strategy remains a very important factor in your games even if you are playing with a season disk that doesn't have left/right stats.

Because many of the Greatest Teams come from the classic era, the players are rated based on standard left/right differentials rather than actual left/right stats.

Games started by position. The Current Season Disk, Projection Disks, and Deluxe Past Seasons include games started at each position versus left- and right-handed pitchers. These values are quite interesting but do not affect player performance in the game. They are included mainly to help generate manager profiles that reflect how each player was used in real life.

Ratings. All season disks include a full set of batting, pitching and defensive ratings for every player. Offensively, players are rated for skills such as sacrifice bunting, bunting for a hit, stealing frequency and success rate, and taking extra bases on hits and fly balls. Pitchers are rated for such talents as their ability to hold runners close, their tendency to balk and throw wild pitches, and their durability as starters or relievers or both. Defensive ratings cover range, error rates, passed ball rates, and throwing.

Event tables. All batters and pitchers have an event table, a hidden set of ratings that play a large part in resolving the outcome of the batter-pitcher confrontations that make up a game. These ratings interact to determine how often a pitcher throws strikes, how often a batter swings, how often those swings result in a swinging strike, a foul ball or a ball put in play, and what events take place when the ball is put in play.

These event tables are adjusted for the context in which each player compiled his statistics -- the era, league rules, and effects of his home park.

They play a fundamental role in providing you with very high levels of statistical accuracy and the flexibility to do such things as (a) play games pitch-by-pitch or batter-by-batter, (b) draft new rosters and have player performances automatically adapt to the new level of competition and new home parks, and (c) play meaningful games between teams from very different eras.

Salaries. We began compiling salary information with the introduction of our 1999 Season Disk and plan to continue including salaries on newly-developed Current Season Disks. Because this information is not used by the game in any way, and because historical salary data is not widely available, we have no plans to add salaries to any other season disks.

Real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups. All of our Current and Deluxe seasons, and some of our Classic seasons, include a complete set of player transactions (including trades, disabled-list moves, promotions, demotions, and suspensions) and the actual starting lineups for every game played that year.

If you choose to play the season using real-life rosters and the transaction feature turned on, Diamond Mind Baseball ensures that the right players are active on each day of the season. And if you turn on the use of real-life lineups, DMB automatically loads those lineups when you start each game.

These features are optional. You can still play the season with any lineups you want, making transactions as you see fit, or even with a totally new set of team rosters. But for folks who enjoy recreating past seasons, the transactions and lineups enable you to achieve higher levels of realism with no additional effort.

Manager profiles. The Diamond Mind Baseball computer manager uses a manager profile to guide its decision-making. A manager profile contains starting lineups versus left- and right-handed pitching; depth charts that are used to set up platoons, defensive replacements, and utility players at every position; the starting rotation; relief pitching assignments (mopup, long relief, setup, closer); and tactical preferences such as bunting, using relievers, pinch hitting, and positioning the defense.

Every season disk includes a manager profile for every team. Whether you want to autoplay entire seasons, play games with the computer manager handling the other team, or just quick play a few innings a game, the profiles are already set up and ready to go.

Summing up. It should be clear by now that there's a ton of information in every one of these season disks, regardless of the category they fall into. But there are a few differences, and here's a table comparing the different categories of season disks:

In the above table, an entry of "Most" or "Varies" indicates that some season disks in that category include the information and some don't. The details are provided on the pages that describe each category of season disk in more detail.