                        2006 Season Disk Notes
                        ----------------------

December 11, 2006

For the past several weeks, we've been immersed in the process of creating 
the 2006 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 a review 
of this year's Gold Glove winners and a description of the processes we
use to come up with our player ratings.

Another annual tradition is our assessment of whether each team's 
underlying statistical performance was consistent with the number of wins 
and losses they racked up in the standings.  You can find this discussion
on our web site (www.diamond-mind.com) in an article titled "Measuring
Team Efficiency".

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
  Team Efficiency
  Parting Thought


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

The real-life statistics on this 2006 Season Disk are the copyrighted 
property of STATS LLC.  Any commercial use or distribution without
the express written consent of STATS is strictly prohibited.

This document and all other information in this 2006 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 1242 players (607 batters and 635 
pitchers), including 127 who played on two teams 4 who played on three 
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 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 2,300 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 disk 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.

The vast majority of the player transactions are exactly as they were in 
real life.  However, some of the disabled list transactions never really
happened.  After the rosters expand to 40 on September 1, real-life teams
have no reason to put an injured player on the disabled list because they
no longer need to free up a spot on the active roster.  As a result, a
player can miss most or all of September and never visit the DL.  When
this happened, we created an artificial DL transaction that ensures that
the player is unavailable to play during his injury.
  
  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.

Philadelphia moved the left field wall back five feet.  San Diego closed
off a small triangular section in right-center field.  And St. Louis
moved into a new stadium with the same name (Busch) as the old one.

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 disk.  You can download the new and updated park images for 2006
from our web site (www.diamond-mind.com) at no charge.


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 USA
Today Sports Weekly or mlb.com.

In some cases, we use the searchable video archive on mlb.com to view 
video clips that helped us nail down the batting sides of several players 
whose information was in doubt.  

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 327,000 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.  Unfortunately, because we were unable to
find the real numbers for these players, we used their 2005 salaries, if 
we had them, or assumed they were also making the minimum, and those 
figures will be correct only some of the time.


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.

In recent years, we've written an annual article that explores these 
relationships between runs and wins and between offensive events and
runs.  You can find these articles on our web site (www.diamond-mind.com), 
and we encourage you to take a few minutes to check out this year's
edition.

In those articles, we present various measures of performance
and identify teams that were unusually efficient or inefficient in 
their ability to translate offensive events created/prevented into 
runs scored/allowed and wins/losses.  And we point out that these 
efficiency-related anomalies rarely persist from season to season,
which is a strong indication that there's a great deal of luck involved.

What does this mean for the Diamond Mind Baseball game and our annual 
Season Disk?  We've created a season disk 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.

In 2006, three teams were most affected by these efficiency-related
factors.  Toronto and Cleveland posted underlying stats that support
much better records than the ones they actually finished with, while
Oakland was the over-achiever of the year, winning 93 games despite
mediocre team stats.  For the details, please see the team efficiency 
article on our web site.


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 a lot easier if we just carried forward a player's ratings 
from year to year, based our ratings on what we hear in the media, or 
came up with some simple formulas to compute the ratings for us.  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.
