Baseball Mogul 2016: New Features

More Realistic Simulations - Now 70% Faster

This year's focus was on making Baseball Mogul 2016 better instead of bigger. The first task was ripping out and rebuilding some old database code that caused problems with sims before World War II — and sometimes caused a loss of data when saving games to the hard drive. As a result of this effort, historical simulations are now much more realistic. An added benefit is that the entire simulation is more than 70% faster!

New Player Rating Editor (and new ratings)

You can now directly edit each player's individual ratings (replacing the previous frustrating method of editing the player's statistical projections until the game assigned the desired ratings). All batting ratings are editable versus lefty and right pitchers, making it possible to accurately represent players like Mickey Mantle (who was a better overall hitter when batting right-handed despite having more power as a lefty).

This new format also introduces some new ratings, such as "Gap Power", "Plate Protection" and "Steal Tendency".

Improved Player Aging

In previous versions, ratings like "Speed" and "Power" matured and deteriorated at different rates, but the process was inexact because of the way ratings were derived from player statistics. With the new database format, we did our own research into how a player's skill set improves and declines. A couple of interesting findings:

1) The conventional wisdom is correct that catchers lose foot speed more quickly than other players, presumably because of the wear and tear on their knees.

2) Despite modern training practices, pitcher effectiveness peaks earlier now than it did in the 20th century.

PITCHf/x Data

We've parsed and processed PITCHf/x data for more than 5 million individual pitches over the last 14 years, giving us more realistic pitch ratings and pitch selection for more than 1,400 different pitchers (in addition to the hand-edited pitch repertoire information that is included for pitchers going back to the 19th century.

Plus Many Smaller Changes, such as:

You can now choose either a "strict" or "flexible" pitching rotation for each team.

• With a flexible rotation, the computer manager will skip the last starter depending on how well rested your ace is. As before, this level of flexibility is still adjustable for every team and every player using the "Start On Short Rest" strategy setting.

Improved artificial intelligence for salary arbitration.

Improved general manager AI (including roster management, drafting, trading and free agent salaries).

New system for "generic photos" (used for fictional players). This fixes the problem where a player's handedness might not match that shown in his action photo.

...

Updates for Opening Day of the 2016 Season

• Updated rosters for every franchise including more than 2100 active players
• Complete major league and minor league stats through 2015
• Includes 1.4 million lines of minor league stats
• Authentic 2016 MLB season schedule (all 2430 games)

Backwards Compatibility

Baseball Mogul 2016 automatically loads databases from previous versions of Baseball Mogul.