Sunday, March 24, 2013

Baseball Mogul 2014: New Feature Descriptions

Although this repeats some of the information posted earlier this month, this is the description of new features that is being included in the help files for Baseball Mogul 2014:

Major League Equivalencies

Baseball Mogul automatically analyzes each player's career (at all levels, including major league and minor league stats) and converts them to "Major League Equivalencies", projecting how each player will perform in the upcoming season. For example, a .300 batting average with the Pawtucket Red Sox might translate to a .273 batting average at the major league level. Real-life minor league stats (see below) are adjusted for level of play and park factors.

Stat-Based Scouting

Player Ratings in Baseball Mogul are now based entirely on statistics that the player has already accrued. In other words, ratings are not a magical window into a player's "true ability level". Like a modern-day General Manager, you must predict a player's future performance from his past performance. Luckily, Baseball Mogul does the hard work for you, translating each player's stats into Major League Equivalencies, and then combining those to create a single-season Projection.
Stat-Based Scouting (aka "Realistic Scouting") is the default for Baseball Mogul 2014. Use the Options Dialog to change back to "Variable Scouting" (see below) or "Traditional Scouting" (the system used in previous versions of Baseball Mogul).

Player Projections

You can now view single-season projections for each player without having to use Commissioner Mode. Choose "Projections" from the Lineup Dialog, Defense Dialog, Pitching Dialog, Free Agents Dialog, Leaders Page, etc.
Unlike Commissioner Mode (which shows the secret statistics used by the simulation engine), the "Projections" line shows a statistical forecast calculated from the player's past performance, and adjusted for player age and position.

Variable Scouting

Variable Scouting is a variation on the Traditional Scouting system used in previous versions of Baseball Mogul. As with Traditional Scouting, the accuracy of your ratings depends on the quality of you scouting staff. The difference is that Variable Scouting reflects the fact that it's more difficult to scout young amatuer players than it is to scout major league veterans. For example, it doesn't take a genius to state that Miguel Cabrera has a high Power Rating. Therefore, Variable Scouting increases the uncertainty for younger players, and decreases it for players with a sizable body of work.

Updated Rosters

As with every version of Baseball Mogul, you are just a few clicks away from playing the current baseball season.

Minor League Stats

More than 1 million lines of minor league data at all levels (from modern "Short Season A" teams to the "C" and "D" teams that were around before World War II).

Lefty-Righty Stats

Baseball Mogul 2014 automatically loads accurate lefty-righty splits for all players going back to 1950 (thanks to Retrosheet.com).

New General Manager Artificial Intellgence

Roster management, contract negotiations and player trading have been rewritten to better match our studies or real-life GM behavior.

New Animations and Player Uniforms

We know that you don't play Baseball Mogul for the graphics. But it gets annoying when every batter and pitcher in the game is the same pale white guy in a blue uniform. So we finally updated the game to reflect each player's height, weight and skin color. You can also edit the home and away uniform colors (and alternate uniforms) for each team.

New Batter-Pitcher Model

In addition to new animations, the batter-pitcher interface now features accurate strike zones for each batter. Albert Pujols is not only bigger than Dustin Pedroia, his strike zone is also bigger (vertically), making it slightly easier to get a pitch over for a strike.

Individual Player Strategies

You can now adjust managerial strategies for each individual player. So, you can tell your entire team to be more aggressive in regards to stealing bases, but also tell individual players to be more conservative to avoid "running themselves out of the inning" (such as players who get on base with your best hitters coming to the plate).
The Player Strategy dialog also includes a "Pitch Count" option for pitchers, allowing you to set a hard pitch count limit for one or more of your pitchers without affecting your entire pitchign staff.

New Defensive Model

You can switch players back and forth between positions without permanently harming their skills.

Backwards Compatibility

Baseball Mogul 2014 automatically loads databases from previous versions of Baseball Mogul.
As always, Baseball Mogul 2014 comes with no annoying copy protection or DRM (digital rights management). We treat customers like customers, not criminals.
Buy Baseball Mogul 2014

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looking forward to the game :)

The scouting changes sound interesting. One thing I'm wondering: Does the AI-controlled teams and the players evaluate their talent based on the scouting method that we choose?

So if we go with the new scouting method, will the AI potentially over/under value players based on their past performances (just like the human manager might). Likewise, will a player demand more than he's actually worth after a great season and less after a bad one? And will those evaluations change on the AI side if we swap to the traditional method?

Clay Dreslough said...

"Does the AI-controlled teams and the players evaluate their talent based on the scouting method that we choose?"

Yes. One complaint about the previous scouting system ("Traditional Scouting") was that it was too easy to find good players (because you could see their "hidden" stats).

But I also got complaints that it seemed like the AI was cheating, by knowing which players were going to blossom. With "stat-based scouting", the AI has access to none of that.

Anonymous said...

Nice, thanks for the hard work, Clay.

Do the projections update in-season? i.e., if a player performs well early in the season, do the projections adjust accordingly based on the new information?

Also, do the defensive projections feed defensive ratings as well? For the Phillies alone I'm seeing multiple guys projected at -40 or -50 defensive runs per 150 games, which would instantly be some of the worst fielding performances of all time:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/share.cgi?id=VjRBQ

I might buy certain guys putting up numbers like that in retrospect. But shouldn't projections be far more regressed to the mean as talent estimates? Even somebody like Derek Jeter at his worst was probably not a -20 true talent fielder, much less -40 or -50.

Anonymous said...

After a few years of simulation, I'm noticing that many of the ratings of my defensive players severely regress. Why is this happening? It seems to be driven by a regression in range.

Anonymous said...

So I just bought BB Mogul 2014 from your site and loaded up the game, over a year after you posted this blog, and I still don't have stat-based scouting?

All I get is some blurb telling me that stat based scouting is still under construction and linking me to a patch that doesn't exist yet.

This despite the fact that on your site, it clearly states that 2014 has a new scouting system which is how I ended up on this blog in the first place.

What's up with that, Clay? That's misleading and extremely disappointing. I've asked for a refund.