Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: July 23, 2003

Do I need to order the Historical Ballpark Database to use your past seasons?

In most cases, no. Every season disk includes all of the ballpark information you need to play realistic games with the teams on that disk.

The Historical Ballpark Database has two roles. First, if you want to create a fantasy league of your own using some historical parks that you don't already have in your season disk collection, you can import parks from the historical database and use them in your league.

Second, if you wish to use DMB's player-creation feature, you can reference the park effects data in this database so your players will be created on a park-adjusted basis. (That's how we create players.)

Can I play games among teams from different season disks?

Yes, you can do just about anything you want using standard features of the Diamond Mind Baseball game.

When you play an exhibition game, you can choose the teams, the ballpark, and the era from any season disk that you have installed.

If you want to set up a league using teams, parks, and players from different season disks, you can do that, too. Just open the DMB Organizer window and click on the Import button to gather the things you want into a single database. After you've done that, you can organize those teams into a league and assign home parks to those teams, release all players into free agency and run a draft, generate a new schedule for your league, and so on.

How do park images fit in?

For three reasons, we do not ship park images with each season disk.

First, many of the images you need are installed automatically when you install the Diamond Mind Baseball game, and the ones you don't have can be downloaded free of charge from our web site (assuming those images exist).

Second, most parks don't change from year to year, so it would waste space to store the same image over and over again.

Finally, park image files would increase the size of a season disk file by a factor of ten (e.g. from about 500KB to about 6MB for the 2001 Season Disk), which would make email delivery of season disks impractical for a lot of people.

How does email delivery work?

We send you an email message that contains instructions on how to download and install the season disk, then we attach the season disk as a file attachment to the message. The attached file can be up to 500KB in size.

Our season disk files have always been shipped in a self-extracting zip format and the file name has the .exe extension. Unfortunately, some email system block files with that extension because many viruses are spread with .exe files. For that reason, we now use the .alt extension when emailing season disks. This makes it much more likely that the file will reach you, but means that you will have to rename the file to have an .exe extension before installing it via the "Install season disk" command from the File menu in the game. (Our forthcoming version 9 upgrade will include new installation options that make the renaming step unnecessary.)

We recommend that (after you have renamed the file) you save a copy of the file to a floppy disk or CD-ROM to provide you with a backup of the file.

NOTE: If you are not familiar with downloading and renaming files or overcoming any restrictions that your email system may place on attached files, please do not request the email delivery option.

How do you do park adjustments for combined players?

If a player appeared on more than one team in a given season, we create one player record for each of his teams and one combined record that captures his overall performance for that season. The event table in each of his team-specific records is park-adjusted based on that team's home park. The event table in his combined record is a weighted average of those team-specific event tables, with the weights based on how much he played for each team.

What are your future plans for expanding and/or improving your season disk collection?

We plan to continue releasing our the Current Season Disk a few weeks after the postseason has ended and our annual Projection Disk in the spring.

A non-profit organization called Retrosheet is doing an amazing job of compiling (and validating) play-by-play data for historical seasons. We used their data to create our 1978 through 1983 Deluxe Past Seasons. Retrosheet recently released data for some seasons from the 1960s and 1970s, and we may convert those seasons from the Classic category to the Deluxe category at some point in the future.

We will continue to work on upgrades to some of our existing Classic Past Seasons, and we will release those upgrades as they are completed.

At the moment, the addition of new Classic Past Seasons from the pre-1927 period is a much lower priority. It's clear from our sales records that our customers are much more interested in the years since World War II than they are in older seasons. We always try to spend our time on the projects that we think will provide the most benefit to the most customers, so we're focusing on the other projects just mentioned for the time being.