This year, I finally added support for two-way players like Babe Ruth and Shohei Ohtani. Two-way players can be used as both pitchers and position players over the course of a season. And, thanks to the designated hitter rule, players like Ohtani can even pitch and DH in the same game. Because the Baseball Mogul Scouting Report was designed to show either a pitcher or a position player, two-way players like Ohtani now have two different "views": Click "Scouting" from the Lineup Dialog and you'll see Ohtani's Scouting Report as a DH, with his hitter ratings, skill at each defensive position, and batting splits versus lefty and righty pitchers: Click "Scouting" from the Bullpen and you get his pitching ratings, pitch arsenal, fastball velocity, and pitching splits versus lefty and right hitters: The "Two-Way Player" button below his ratings lets you know he's a two-way player — and you can click it to toggle back and forth between his hitter ratings and pitcher ratings. Creating Two-Way Players Most players in the game are flagged as "one-way" players. To convert a player to a two-way player: Work In Progress
Because there are only a handful of two-way players, this feature wasn't beta-tested extensively. This means that there are still bugs. For example, it's possible to insert Ohtani as a pinch hitter in a game even if he is also the starting pitcher. My philosophy has been to err on the side of letting you break the rules. I would rather get an bug report that says "Baseball Mogul let me do something that violates MLB rules" than get a report that says "Baseball Mogul won't let me do something that is legal within MLB rules". That being said, I would of course like to eliminate both types of bugs. So please let me know when this functionality misbehaves, and I'll get the bugs worked out.
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If you've played Football Mogul for a while, you may have encountered the bug where your starting quarterback tackles the kick returner during a kickoff (?!). Or, worse, your QB is injured during the kickoff (#$%&?!):
Football Mogul 22 introduces the "Playbook Analyzer", a simple but useful tool in the Playbook Editor. Just click any playbook before loading it, and the Playbook Analyzer shows how often each formation is used in that playbook, and calculates the average number of players used at each position. The first example below shows the "Run + Shoot" offensive playbook, used by teams like the Lions, Oilers and Falcons in the early 1990s. It features 3 or 4 wide receivers on most plays. But unlike many of today's offenses, it doesn't require a highly-rated tight end. On the right is the "Featured FB" playbook, typified by the 1972 Miami Dolphins, which had 1000-yard rushers at both halfback and fullback. This feature should make it easier to pick the best playbook for your team. But it should also make it easier to create and manage new custom playbooks.
Knowing that my data was accurate, I created a breakpoint in the debugger to ensure that the data was being loaded correctly — and it was. At this point I just gave up and went to work on other tasks (like the case of the missing pitch). Sometimes your brain just needs a break. I came back to the Glavine bug over the weekend and saw the same thing: the data was correct and it was being loaded correctly. Then I clicked 'F4' in Excel and the cursor jumped all the way down to line number 90160 where Tom Glavine was listed a second time — but without the 'L' flagging him as a lefty. With a blank data field, Baseball Mogul was giving Glavine the default throwing hand (righty). Oops. I have no idea how this bad data ended up at the bottom of the "master.csv" file (for Glavine and ~8,200 other players whose last names start with 'G'). I get biograhical data from the Baseball Databank, and I guess I grabbed a file that hadn't been finalized yet. Anyway, Version 24.13 fixes this bug by removing the bad data (although you will need to start a new game to see the changes). Sorry it took so long.
I got an email this week telling me that some pitchers in Baseball Mogul 2021 were losing one or more of their pitches in the off-season. For example, if you start in 1998, Jeff Suppan has 5 pitches. But then this happens at the beginning of 2002: His cutter disappears, his sinker becomes a slider, and his "four-seamer" becomes a generic "fastball". It turns out that this bug is a side effect of the way we collected pitch data over the years.
In 2016, we added a file called PItch_Type_Frequency.csv, with pitchF/X data going back to the 2002 season. Now, instead of hand-editing each new pitcher's repertoire, I could just update one file. And because I viewed actual pitchF/X data as "better" than the hand-edited file, I told Baseball Mogul to overwrite the data in PitchRatings.csv with data from Pitch_Type_Frequency.csv whenever possible. And this is how Jeff Suppan's pitch repertoire got f---ed up between the 2001 and 2002 season.
It turns out that the hand-edited data had some advantages, such as including 37 different pitch types instead of the 7 tracked by pitchF/X. So I fixed this problem in Version 24.11 by telling Baseball Mogul to prioritize data from the hand-edited file when possible — and to not overwrite a pitcher's pitch repertoire in the middle of their career. |
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