Sports Mogul, Inc. - Blog

We Fixed the Tom Glavine Bug!

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 22:12:21 GMT

Some of you noticed that Tom Glavine is right-handed in Baseball Mogul 2021. I fixed this bug in the most recent patch, but you might be wondering why it took 3 months to fix.

(Most of you will find this boring, unless you are a programmer, or interested in editing or using the Baseball Mogul database.)

I started by opening "Master.csv" in Baseball Mogul's Database folder (inside the "Input" folder). This file stores the biographical information for every player (height, weight, batting hand, throwing hand, birthplace, birthdate, etc.). It is loaded when you start a new game in "Classic" mode.

When I searched for "Glavine" (using Ctrl+F in Microsoft Excel) it brought me down to line 29628 where I saw that he was correctly listed as a lefty (with an 'L' in the "throws" column).

Tom Glavine

Bizarro Tom Glavine

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.

Use the Coupon Code 'BLOG' to get 50% off Baseball Mogul or Football Mogul.

Baseball Mogul 2021

football Mogul 21

Baseball Mogul 2021

$39.99

NEW FEATURES IN BASEBALL MOGUL 2021:

NEW LEADERS PAGE

Filter by season, league, team and/or level of play.

Examples of the lists you can display:

Boston's single-season HR leaders between 1986 and 2003.
Best cumulative postseason OPS since integration (1947-2020).
Most total HBP between 2020 and 2040.
Most HR hit at AAA between 1901 and 2020.

NEW "REPLAY MODE"

Loads each player's historical statistics at the beginning of each season.
Uses only these statistics to determine the player's performance in that season.

NEW PLAY-BY-PLAY FEATURES

Give runners the "green light" to steal (instead of all-or-nothing).
Specify whether the runner at 3B "Goes On Contact" or plays it safe.
12 new Stadium backdrops.

UPDATED ROSTERS

Rosters Built From Scratch for Opening Day of the 2021 Season

More than 2,600 active major league and minor league players.
Updated stats from rookies league to the majors through the 2020 season.

NEW INSTALLER AND IMPROVED CERTIFICATION

Eliminates warning messages from Windows during installation.

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

Customizable Game Logs
Expanded Statistical Database
Automatically Downloads Team Logos* and Player Photos

Baseball Mogul is backed by our 100% money-back guarantee. If you're not happy for any reason, let us know and we'll process your refund immediately.

System Requirements:

1 GB hard drive space
Windows 7 / WIndows 8 / Windows 10

*Baseball Mogul® is not endorsed by Major League Baseball or its affiliates. All league trademarks are property of their respective owners and are not included with the game. Team logos and player photos are downloaded from open source sites after installation. Product images showing the product being used in this manner do not indicate or imply endorsement by any league, team, or player.

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Football Mogul 21

$39.95

Football Mogul 21 is a complete football franchise simulator, putting you in charge of all aspects of the game, from free agent signings and draft picks to individual play calls on game day.

New Features in Football Mogul 21:

New and Updated Player Data

Rosters updated as of September 13 for all 2020 teams.
New ratings and projections for more than 1,600+ active players.
New Replay Mode for more accurate historical season replays.
Every rookie drafted in 2020 — from Joe Burrow (#1) to Tae Crowder (#255).

Includes the 70 years of NFL and AFL history.

Rosters and player ratings for every team from 1951-2020.
Includes franchise moves, new stadiums and expansion drafts.
Automatically adds new teams and adjusts league and division alignment.
Automatically updates league rules for each season.
Includes every season schedule for every team from 1951-2020.

Football Mogul's powerful play designer lets you specify everything from formation and personnel to specific pass routes and blocking assignments. The "best football engine you can buy" simulates every play and records detailed stats that even NFL.com and Pro-Football-Reference don't track.

Football Mogul is backed by our 100% money-back guarantee. If you're not happy, let us know and we'll process your refund immediately.

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The Case of the Missing Pitch

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 10:45:01 GMT

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.

Before we had access to pitchF/X, we maintained a big hand-edited file with each pitcher's pitch types by year. Much of this was built using information from the Neyer/James Guide To Pitchers. But for the hundreds of pitchers that book omitted (including many who reached the majors after it was published), we scoured sources like Baseball America (and did our best to merge conflicting reports when necessary). This data is all stored in a file called PitchRatings.csv. (You can find it in the "Players" folder inside Baseball Mogul's "Input" directory.)

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.

Baseball Mogul: McAfee Bug Workaround

Fri, 21 May 2021 10:29:46 GMT

Some Baseball Mogul users are still having problems with McAfee deleting the game after it's been installed. It's been more than 2 years and McAfee still hasn't fixed the known bug in their software.

If you need proof that Baseball Mogul is safe, you can right click on BB-2021.exe and choose 'Scan' (with the red McAfee icon) and McAfee will tell you the program has no viruses. However, whenever you run Baseball Mogul, McAfee deletes it. After fighting with them since 2018, McAfee is still unwilling to fix this bug. So, here are some steps to workaround the problem:

To replace the one file that McAfee keeps deleting, you can get it here (to avoid reinstalling the entire game):

http://files.sportsmogul.com/BB-2021.exe

(or http://files.sportsmogul.com/BB-2020.exe for Baseball Mogul 2020)

Copy this file to c:/Sports Mogul/Baseball Mogul 21/ (or wherever you installed the game).

Then you'll have to exclude BB-2021.exe from McAfee's Real-Time Scanning:
1. Run the McAfee program.
2. Click Settings (the circular gear cog) at the top right.
3. Click Real-Time Scanning.
4. Click Excluded Files.
5. Click Add File.
6. Navigate to the location of BB-2021.exe (e.g. C:\Sports Mogul\Baseball Mogul 21)
7. Click 'BB21.exe' and click the 'Open' button.
8. Close McAfee and run Baseball Mogul 2021.

I hope this finally resolves your problem. If not, you probably have a few choices:

1) Go back into McAfee Real-Time Scanning and turn off the entire feature.
2) Contact McAfee product support for help.
3) Uninstall McAfee.

As I said above — and I cannot stress this strongly enough as a small business owner who has been developing virus-free software for more than 20 years — this is McAfee's problem, not ours. Other developers are frustrated by the same bug. We could all use your help in contacting McAfee and stressing to them that this bug is a serious headache for their customers (some of whom have just uninstalled McAfee once they realized that it was constantly deleting a program that McAfee itself verified was virus-free).

Thanks!

Clay

Baseball Mogul 2021: Replay Mode

Wed, 19 May 2021 09:12:02 GMT

Baseball Mogul is a multi-season General Manager simulator in which player talent is calculated from overall career stats. An example can be seen below. Although Dwight Gooden pitched poorly in 1994, his ratings at the beginning of the season are quite high — because of his performance in the rest of his career.

However, I've gotten a number of emails from people who would like to use Baseball Mogul to replay single historical seasons, in the same way that they might use a game like Strat-O-Matic or Season Ticket Baseball. Replay Mode makes this possible by determining each player's performance from their real-life statistics for the single season that is being simulated. This is Gooden's Scouting Report when a new game is started in Replay Mode:

Replay Mode loads each player's historical stats for the season that is being simulated, and uses these as the player's "Predicted" stats for the upcoming season. Because Gooden had a bad year in 1994, his ratings are much lower than they were in the previous example.

Playing Time Limits

Replay Mode also lets you view your team's real-life stats for the current season by choosing "Predicted" from the relevant dropdown box. This is useful because Replay Mode uses historical playing time as an upper limit for simulated playing time. Players can be used after they exceed their historical playing time, but their performance will suffer (as shown below).

Replay Mode uses historical stats (Innings Pitched and At Bats) to limit playing time.

A warning is displayed when Dwight Gooden's simulated playing time exceeds his historical ("Predicted") stats.

Continued Development

As mentioned above, Replay Mode is designed for single-season historical replays. Playing multiple seasons can cause problems — primarily because teams will no longer have enough playing time at every position. I could have limited Replay Mode to a single season, but I left it open so that I can continue to test and get feedback. If you are using Replay Mode in a multi-season sim, please let me know how I can improve this feature going forward. (For example, I could add a feature that forced team trades to match historical trades if there is enough interest.)

Thanks!

Combining Players From Different Eras

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Q: How do I create a league with my favorite players from baseball history?

A: Baseball Mogul already has a feature that does something like this, called "All-Time All-Stars". To create a league with the best players from each of the 30 major league franchises:

1) Run Baseball Mogul.
2) Click "Start a New Game of Baseball Mogul".
3) Click "Custom".
4) Click "All-Time All-Stars".

This will create a baseball universe with 30 teams, each populated with the franchise's best players (at the beginning of their best season).

Q: But I want to choose the players in the league.

A: Baseball Mogul has multiple ways to do this. But the easiest is probably to edit the text file that is used by the "All-Time All-Stars" feature.

1) From the Baseball Mogul Help Menu, choose "Open Baseball Mogul Folder".
2) Go into the "Input" folder and then into the "Players" folder.
3) Open "All-Time All-Stars.csv". (Recommended: Make a backup copy first)
4) Delete the rows for any players you don't want to include.
5) Add rows for any players you want to add. You will need to know the player's "Register ID":

You can find this by visiting the player's Baseball-Reference page and clicking on "Minor Lg Stats" — the player's ID can be found in the URL.

4) Delete the rows for any players you don't want to include.
5) Add rows for any players you want to add.

For Step 5 above, you will need to know the player's 12-character "Register ID". You can find this by visiting the player's Baseball-Reference page and clicking on "Minor Lg Stats" — the player's ID can be found in the URL:

Alternatively, you can download the Player Register from the Baseball Databank (this file is also found in Baseball Mogul's "Database" folder).

The player's "Register ID" is in the column labeled "key_bbref_minors":

6) Save "All-Time All-Stars".
7) Start a new game using the "All-Time All-Stars" option.

Q: Also, I only want to include players from the 16 pre-expansion teams.

A: Follow the steps above to select your favorite players from each franchise. For post-expansion teams like the Arizona Diamondbacks (ARI), leave that part of the file as is. After you start a new game, you can go to the League Editor and delete the teams you don't want included. This will also delete the players on those teams.