Encyclopedia

Last updated: February 18, 2004

Many Diamond Mind customers are involved in leagues that span more than one season. Some play in DMB draft leagues where rosters are carried forward from year to year. Others play a series of consecutive Classic or Deluxe Past Seasons using real-life rosters.

The Diamond Mind Baseball Encyclopedia enables you to import the results of multiple Diamond Mind Baseball seasons into a single database that supports a wide range of reports on single seasons and ranges of seasons.

The benefits

With a multi-season database and a customizable reporting system at hand, you can do a lot of things that are great fun.

Pop up the batting leaders for any season. Click one button to look at the leaders for the next season, and the next, and so on. Take a look at the individual pitching stats for your favorite team. Pick a season, then cycle through all of the other seasons in the database. Look over the career batting, pitching or fielding stats for any player.

Review the standings for any season. If you really want to get into the details, look over the final score of every game from that season. And, if you've chosen to save them, the boxscore and scoresheet for that game.

Display a leaderboard showing the top single-season pitching performances in the entire encyclopedia. Or for a range of years. Limit it to one league, or even one team. Or combine all of these options to find a team's top individual performances over a period of time.

Or, if you prefer, show a leaderboard of the top cumulative performances. We could have said top "career" performances here, but you also have the option to rank players based on cumulative stats over any period of time.

It's not an exaggeration to say that you can easily spend hours, perhaps even days, just wandering through the data and seeing what pops up next.

And the web site generator gives you another way to do that. In just a couple of minutes, you can generate hundreds, even thousands, of the reports for the entire encyclopedia. The end result is a web site of linked pages that you can browse to your heart's content. In fact, here's a sample web site that we created after simulating the 1927 to 1931 Classic Past Seasons.

By the way, the web site generator isn't just for people who run web sites. After the files are saved to your hard drive, you can use Windows Explorer to display the top-level page and follow the links from there. It's just like being on a real web site, except that you don't have to wait for the pages to download.

The process

Like the Diamond Mind Baseball game, the Encyclopedia includes an Organizer window that lists all of the organizations, leagues, teams, parks, and players that are included in the encyclopedia and provides easy access to tools that you can use to browse and modify the contents of the encyclopedia.

The process of importing a DMB season is very simple. Before importing the season, use DMB to check whether the organizations, leagues, teams, parks, and players have the Universal IDs (UIDs) that are needed to link them across years. In most cases, these items will have the necessary UIDs, but if not, DMB offers some simple tools for setting them up.

When the UIDs are in good shape, start the DMB Encyclopedia, choose the Import Season command, and tell it where to find the DMB database you wish to import. The DMB Encyclopedia imports all of the relevant items and establishes relationships with existing items in the encyclopedia that have the same UIDs.

NOTE: If you have one or more seasons that were played using an earlier version of DMB, you can use DMB to convert those seasons to version 9 format, and then import them into the encyclopedia.

You can also remove a previously-loaded season from an encyclopedia. This is handy when you want to import a season in progress while preserving your ability to replace it later with updated information from the same season.

When you have imported one or more seasons into the encyclopedia, you can generate reports. We've included all of the reports you're accustomed to seeing in the DMB game except for a few (such as Current Injuries and Team Status) that aren't relevant for seasons that have been completed.

Most of these reports behave in the same way as in DMB in that they display information from a single season. In the DMB Encyclopedia, of course, you can choose from any of the seasons that have been loaded.

Other reports have been added or enhanced to take advantage of the multiple seasons that are stored in the encyclopedia. These include the multi-season leaderboards and the career register reports.

If you have more than one league for which you'd like to build an encyclopedia, no problem. You can create and manage a separate encyclopedia for each of your leagues.