                        2017 Season Database Notes
                        --------------------------

December 19, 2017

For the past several weeks, we've been immersed in the process of creating
the 2017 Season Database.  Now that the stats are loaded, the ratings are
assigned, and our final testing is well underway, we thought we'd take
some time to discuss what goes into the player ratings, how we come up with
our ratings, and how to interpret those ratings.

Those of you who have been customers of Diamond Mind for a while will
recognize that some of the material in this note has changed very little
since last year.  We apologize for making you wade through some things that
you already know, but we feel it is important to repeat certain comments for
the benefit of the many new customers who have begun playing Diamond Mind
Baseball in the past year.

These topics are covered in this note:

  Copyright notices
  License agreement
  Database contents
  Real-Life Transactions, Game-by-Game Lineups, and Schedules
  Parks and Weather Information
  The Accuracy of Real-life Statistics
  Real-life Salaries
  Holds and blown saves
  Team Efficiency
  Parting Thought


Copyright notices
-----------------

The real-life statistics on this 2017 Season Database are the copyrighted
property of Major League Baseball.  Any commercial use or distribution without
the express written consent of MLB is strictly prohibited.

This document and all other information in this 2017 Season Database are
the copyrighted property of Diamond Mind, Inc.  Any commercial use or
distribution without the express written consent of Diamond Mind is
strictly prohibited.


License agreement
-----------------

Please read this license agreement carefully.  Use of Diamond Mind Baseball
("the Software") and related Season Databases constitutes your acceptance of
these terms and conditions and your agreement to abide by them.

The Software and Seasons are protected by copyright laws and international
copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties.

This license agreement grants you the nonexclusive right to use this
Season Database for personal and recreational use.  Commercial use of
this Season Database is not permitted.  You may not rent or lease this
Season Database.

You are authorized to make backup copies of this Season Database for the
sole purpose of protecting your investment.  You may transfer the
Season Database freely from one computer to another, so long as there is no
possibility of it being used by two people in two places at the same time.

If you administer or play in a league that uses Diamond Mind Baseball and
this Season Database, you are authorized to distribute copies of this Season
Database to other league members, PROVIDED YOU FIRST RECEIVE CONFIRMATION
FROM DIAMOND MIND THAT EACH AND EVERY PERSON TO WHOM YOU ARE MAKING THE
DATABASE AVAILABLE IS A REGISTERED OWNER OF THE DIAMOND MIND BASEBALL GAME
AND THIS Season Database.  Distributing this Season Database in any other fashion
is a violation of our copyright and is strictly prohibited.

You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this license
agreement provided you retain no copies and the recipient agrees to the
terms of this license agreement.

This Season Database is provided "as-is" without warranty of any kind.
Diamond Mind will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential,
indirect, or similar damages.


Database contents
-----------------

We have created player records for everyone who appeared in the big leagues
this season -- that's a total of 1494 players (677 batters and 817
pitchers), including 128 who played on two teams and four who played on three
or more teams.

If a player appeared on more than one team in real life, we created a
player record for each team (for people who do season replays using the real
rosters) plus a combined record (for use in draft leagues).  The combined
records appear in the free agent listings.

In the weeks since the season ended, we've computed, reviewed, and loaded
into your season database files:

  over 60,000 stats:  batting, pitching, fielding, starts by position

  over 9,000 player facts:  names, batting and throwing hands, birthdates

  over 20,000 player ratings that you can see: injury, bunting, range,
  running, throwing, and so on

  over 35,000 ratings that you can't see:  the event tables and
  pitch-by-pitch ratings that make the game produce accurate results

  opening day rosters for every team, plus more than 4,150 real-life
  transactions, and

  real-life starting lineups for every game played this season


Real-Life Transactions, Game-by-Game Lineups, and Schedules
-----------------------------------------------------------

As you know, inter-league play is a fact of life in this era, and this
season database has been prepared accordingly.  There is a single schedule
that includes both games within leagues and inter-league games, and it
is no longer possible to simulate one league at a time.

We have compiled a complete set of real-life transactions (trades,
promotions and demotions, disabled list moves, and so on) and game-by-game
starting lineups.  If you play seasons using the real-life rosters and
schedule, Diamond Mind Baseball will process real-life transactions on the
appropriate dates and will choose the real-life starting lineups for each
game.

  NOTE:  If you want to change the real-life rosters in any way, either
  by moving one or two players around or by drafting entirely new teams,
  you'll need to modify the settings for your league or organization to
  turn off the use of real-life transactions and game-by-game lineups.
  Those transactions and lineups are meaningless once you change the
  rosters.

To make all this work, the league schedule shows games when they were
actually played.  (We call this the as-played schedule.)  If, for example,
a game was originally scheduled for April, but was rained out and replayed
in September, it shows up on the schedule in September.  That's the only
way to do it, since the starting lineups for a game in September might
include a player who was not on the roster on the original April date.
(One exception:  if there was a tie game, that game is not included in the
schedule since it is replayed later most of the time.)

Because some of you might like to use the original schedule, we've included
that schedule, too.  (We call this the as-scheduled schedule, because all
games are listed on the dates when they were originally scheduled.)  It's
listed on the Schedules tab in the Organizer window and it's available to
be assigned to your organization.

  NOTE:  If you switch to the as-scheduled schedule, remember to turn off
  the use of real-life transactions and lineups.


Parks and Weather Information
-----------------------------

As we do each year, we have updated the ballpark information to reflect
changes in the physical characteristics of the parks, their statistical
impact on offense, and the weather patterns for the current season.

Beginning with the release of Diamond Mind Baseball version 8 in December,
2000, we began supplying scale drawings of each park that are displayed
on the main game window.  These images are quite large, and most of them
don't change from year to year, so we don't include them when we ship a
season database.  You can download any new and updated park images for 2017
from our web site (www.diamond-mind.com) at no charge.


The Accuracy of Real-life Statistics
------------------------------------

As always, this Season Database is the product of extensive research into
player performance.  Using detailed information, we compile batting,
pitching and fielding statistics.

After years of compiling and licensing statistics from the leading
statistics companies, we have learned that there is not always 100%
agreement on the official stats and various breakdowns.  Small
differences often exist in the data published by different companies
and by baseball's official statisticians.

You may find it surprising that it's not always clear which way a
player bats or throws.  Most of these cases don't matter much, since the
majority involve relief pitchers who rarely or never batted during the
season.  But sometimes an important player is hard to pin down.  It's not
all that unusual to find a player listed as a switch-hitter in the team's
media guide and as a right-handed batter in other places such as USA
Today Sports Weekly or mlb.com.

As a result of the work we do in this area, our batting hand info and
our left/right splits may differ slightly from those on various web
sites.  We believe our information is at least as good as any other
source you may use.

In our experience, fielding stats get less attention than batting and
pitching stats when it comes to finding and correcting mistakes.  There
are always small differences between the fielding statistics published
by STATS (supplier to most major web sites) and the official statistics.
As far as we know, no player is off by more than one in any category,
so none of the differences will have any impact on player performance
in your DMB games.

The bottom line is that if you see a small difference between the stats
we publish and your favorite book or online site, don't be surprised.
Of course, if the difference is significant, please let us know so we
can research it and make any necessary correction if it turns out that
the error is in our data.


Real-life Salaries
------------------

A few years ago, we made space in our player file to store the salary and
contract expiration year for each player.  It was never our intent to fill
in these slots with information on real-life contracts.  Rather, we added
them so Diamond Mind Baseball leagues that use salary cap systems would be
able to enter their salaries, see those salaries on screen and in reports,
and have those salaries carried forward from year to year by our season
disk migration feature.

But we've been asked by quite a few of our customers to add the real-life
salary information anyway.  And that's what we've been doing for the past
few years.

Many real-life player contracts have special provisions for bonuses,
incentive clauses, and deferred compensation.  So it's not always obvious
how to come up with a single number that represents a player's actual
salary.  And most salary information is published at the beginning of
the season, so many of the players who are called up during the year have
not been included.  We've assumed that these players are at the minimum
salary specified in the most recent collective bargaining agreement.

Unfortunately, the published salary information is limited to players who
were on the active roster or the disabled list on opening day.  There is
no public source of salary information for players who were added to the
big-league roster after opening day.

Many of those players are minor-leaguers with little or no major league
service time, so it's safe to assume they're making the minimum, which was
$535,000 (535K) this year.  But there's another group of players, often
veteran fringe players, who most likely earned something between the
minimum and a million dollars.  For these players, we used their actual
salaries when we could find them and estimated the rest based on how
long they have been in the major leagues.


Holds and blown saves
---------------------

These statistics are not part of the official rules of baseball, so the
various companies that produce the statistics and boxscores that you see
in the press and on web sites are free to define these any way they like.

In part because STATS was the first to come up with these ideas, the
software that we use to compile pitching stats uses definitions that are
very similar to those behind the numbers supplied by STATS to their
customers. But those definitions are not exactly the same, so our
numbers don't quite match the ones published by STATS.

Generally speaking, STATS awards a hold whenever a reliever enters the
game in a save situation and holds the lead until another reliever takes
over.  But they don't award a hold when the reliever enters the game in
the middle innings, even though the reliever is entitled to a save if he
holds the lead through the end of the game and pitches effectively for
at least three innings.  And they don't charge a reliever with a blown
save when he enters the game that early, either.


Team Efficiency
---------------

Every year, a small number of teams post a real-life win-loss record
that's not completely in synch with the way that team produced during
the season.

In some cases, a team scores and allows the same number of runs, give
or take, but somehow manages to win 90 games.  Or a team might outscore
its opponents by a healthy margin and still finish around the .500 mark.
In any given season, at least 70% of the teams will produce a win-loss
record that fits its underlying run margin, but there are always
exceptions.

Furthermore, the relationship between hits and walks and other offensive
events, on the one hand, and runs produced by those events, on the other
hand, is usually quite strong.  But every season reveals a few teams
that score more or fewer runs than you'd expect given the stats posted
by the players on that team.  The same thing can happen with run
prevention.

What does this mean for the Diamond Mind Baseball game and our annual
Season Download?  We've created a season download in which every player
matches his real-life performance when the season is simulated many times
and the results are averaged.  Nevertheless, some teams will win more or
fewer games than they did in real life because the real-life season
was played only once.

In any one season, whether it be a real-life season or a simulated one,
strange things can happen.  A team can win a dozen fewer games than it
should for its run margin.  Players can have career years or bad years.
Teams can get on a magical run when they always seem to get that clutch
hit or clutch double play just when they need it most.

We could change how the players are rated to force the teams to match
their real-life records more closely, but that would distort the value
of those players when they're used in draft leagues, and it would hide
the fact that some real-life teams were very lucky or unlucky to post
the records they did.

So we choose to focus mostly on player performance and let the team
efficiency issues fall where they may.  Team performance is a very
useful benchmark to make sure we rate the players correctly, but if
there are clearly identifiable reasons why a team didn't produce the
win-loss record you'd expect given how its players performed, we
won't undermine the player ratings to narrow this gap.

The 2016 season had seven teams off by more than six victories with
the Rangers at +13, the Philliess at +11, the Yankees at +6, the Rays
at -8, the Red Sox at -7, the Cubs at -7 and the Angels at -6.

The 2017 season had four teams off by more than six victories with
the Padres at +13, the Royals at +8, the Indians at -7, and the Yankees
at -10.

The bounce-back theory predicted that those seven teams from 2016 would
fall back to the mean which all did but the Yankees (-10)
who continue to under-achieve again.

If you replay the 2017 season using Diamond Mind Baseball, those
teams will post win totals that reflect the normal relationships
between (a) offensive events and runs and (b) runs and wins.  The
only way we can force these teams to match their real-life win
totals is to distort the ratings of the players in order to make
them perform better in your simulated games than they did in real life.

Those distortions would be highly undesirable in any leagues where
these players are drafted or traded onto new rosters, so we chose
to maintain the integrity of the player ratings and let the teams
perform as they would have in real life had those relationships
between events and runs and wins held up in normal fashion.


Parting Thought
---------------

We put a lot of effort into our Season Database each year -- slogging
through reference sources to track down batting and throwing hand
discrepancies, compiling stats and checking them against other sources,
entering and checking more than three thousand player transactions, and
poring over thousands of pages of analytical data and player notes to
come up with what we believe are highly accurate player ratings.

We hope you are pleased with the results, and thanks again for
choosing to play Diamond Mind Baseball.
