                        2001 Season Disk Notes
                        ----------------------

For the past several weeks, we've been immersed in the process of creating 
the 2001 Season Disk.  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 season disk, how we come up with 
our ratings, and how to interpret those ratings.

In years past, we crammed everything we wanted to say into this note, but
we're splitting things up now.  In separate notes, you'll find comments 
on how we rate players, a review of this year's Gold Glove winners, and
an assessment of whether each team's underlying statistical performance
was consistent with the number of wins and losses they racked up in the
standings.

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
  Disk 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
  Pickoffs
  Parting Thought


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

The real-life statistics on this 2001 Season Disk are the copyrighted 
property of STATS, Inc.  Any commercial use or distribution without
the express written consent of STATS is strictly prohibited.

This document and all other information in this 2001 Season Disk 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 Disks constitutes your acceptance of 
these terms and conditions and your agreement to abide by them.  If you do 
not accept these terms and conditions, return the product(s) to Diamond 
Mind within 30 days for a refund.

The Software and Season Disks 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 Disk for personal and recreational use.  Commercial use of 
this Season Disk is not permitted.  You may not rent or lease this 
Season Disk.

You are authorized to make backup copies of this Season Disk for the 
sole purpose of protecting your investment.  You may transfer the  
Season Disk 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 Disk, you are authorized to distribute copies of this Season
Disk to other league members, PROVIDED YOU FIRST RECEIVE CONFIRMATION
FROM DIAMOND MIND THAT EACH AND EVERY PERSON TO WHOM YOU ARE MAKING THE
DISK AVAILABLE IS A REGISTERED OWNER OF THE DIAMOND MIND BASEBALL GAME
AND THIS Season Disk.  Distributing this Season Disk 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 Disk is provided "as-is" without warranty of any kind.  
Diamond Mind will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential, 
indirect, or similar damages.


Disk contents
-------------

We have created player records for everyone who appeared in the big leagues 
this season -- that's a total of 1220 players (636 batters and 584 
pitchers), including 111 who played on two teams and 4 who played on three
teams.  In the weeks since the season ended, we've computed, reviewed, and
loaded into your season disk 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 2,000 real-life 
transactions, and

* real-life starting lineups for every game played this season

If a player appeared on more than one team in real life, we have 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.


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

As you know, 2001 was the fifth season of inter-league games, and this 
season disk has been prepared accordingly.  There is a single schedule
that includes games within leagues and inter-league games, and it is
no longer possible to simulate just 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.

Two new stadiums opened this year (Miller Park in Milwaukee and PNC Park
in Pittsburgh) and the dimensions of three others (Camden Yard in Baltimore,
Cinergy Field in Cincinnati, and Comiskey Park in Chicago) were altered
before the season started.

Beginning with the release of Diamond Mind Baseball version 8 in December,
2000, we began supplying scale drawings of each park.  These images are
displayed on the main game window when you play games in those parks, and
we are committed to maintaining and adding to our collection of park images.
Consequently, we have created images for the new and modified stadiums,
and you can download them at no charge from our web site.

You don't need the new park images to use this season disk.  Until you
download the new images, DMB will display the generic park diagram when
you play games in those parks.  But it's the ballpark information in the
database, especially the statistical park factors, that really matters,
because that's what the game uses to determine the outcomes of plays in
those parks.


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

As always, this Season Disk is the product of extensive research into
player performance.  We begin by licensing pitch-by-pitch and play-by-play
data for every big-league game from STATS Inc.  Using this detailed
information, we compile batting, pitching and fielding statistics and
carry out computerized studies that help us rate players for skills such
as baserunning, throwing, bunting, and defense.

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 Baseball
Weekly or mlb.com.

This year, we had a wonderful new tool to help us get these right:  a 
searchable video archive on mlb.com that you can access for only $10 a
year.  We signed up and used it to view video clips of a number of plate
appearances.  Using this tool, we were able to nail down the batting sides
of several players whose information was in doubt.

As a result, if you were to go through every single player and compare our
batting hand info to that in the STATS Major League Handbook, you'd find
seven differences.  Based on our input, STATS has now corrected these
values in their database, but this work was done after their Major League
Handbook went to print.

(Please don't take this as a criticism of STATS.  They do a tremendous job
of compiling baseball data on a very timely basis and with an extremely
high level of accuracy.  We are eternally grateful to them for putting
together a research-quality database of baseball information and for
getting their books out so soon after the season has ended.  And because
they care every bit as much as we do about getting this stuff right, they
are always extremely responsive whenever we have questions or new
information.  If the clubs cannot always get this stuff right in their
own media guides, it's not a surprise that a few minor discrepancies
occasionally creep into the STATS books, too.)

And in a typical year, there are more than fifty situations in which a
player bats from the opposite side of the plate than he normally does,
often involving switch hitters who batted the "wrong" way against
knuckleball pitchers.  Other switch hitters may bat the wrong way when
facing a pitcher they've really stuggled against.  And players
occasionally start or stop switch-hitting during the season.

The folks at STATS are quite diligent about these things, and their
play-by-play data notes any plate appearance when a batter bats the
"wrong" way.  We generated a list of all of these plate appearances
and double-checked them just to be sure.  In some cases, we used the
video archive on mlb.com to validate the information.

As a result of our work on batting and throwing hands, our left/right
splits are slightly different from those in the Major League Handbook
and other sources.  None of the differences are significant enough to
have a big effect on player performance in your DMB games, but we
thought you'd like to know where these differences came from and why we
believe our splits are slightly more accurate.  

Over the years, we've discovered that fielding stats get less attention 
when it comes to finding and correcting mistakes.  There are always small 
differences between the fielding statistics in the STATS books, the Elias 
data, and the official statistics, and that's true again this year.  As
far as we know, the errors totals match exactly this year, and no player
is off by more than one in any other 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.


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 in the STATS Major League 
Handbook.  But they are not exactly the same, so our numbers don't quite
match the ones in the STATS books.

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 in 
the process.  And they don't charge a reliever with a blown save when he 
enters the game that early, either.  

Here are a couple of examples:

- a pitcher entered in the top of the fifth with a 1-0 lead and tossed 
a shutout inning before being replaced.  STATS didn't award a hold.

- a pitcher entered in the top of the fifth with a 1-0 lead and two 
runners on base, gave up a single that tied the game, and was pulled 
immediately.  STATS didn't charge him with a blown save.

Our software awards a hold and charges a blown save in these middle-
inning situations because we believe it's useful to measure the 
performance of these middle relievers.


Pickoffs
--------

The STATS Major League Handbook divides pickoffs into two categories,
straight pickoffs and "pitcher caught stealing".  The latter group
includes plays were the pitcher throws to first, the runner breaks for
second, and the runner is thrown out.  In Diamond Mind Baseball, we
credit the pitcher with a pickoff on both types of plays, so our 
real-life pickoff totals match the sum of the two categories from the 
STATS book.


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

We put a lot of effort into our Season Disk 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 two 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.  

It would be easier, we suppose, if we just carried forward a player's 
ratings from year to year or if we based our ratings on what we hear 
in the media.  But we don't believe we'd be doing our job if we did 
that.  

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