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Improved League Builder, Exhibition Mode

3/31/2026

2 Comments

 
I spent some time in the off-season playing around with the League Builder and Exhibition Mode and making some improvements:

1) I fixed some issues with putting the same player on multiple teams. If you put the 1918 Red Sox and 1927 Yankees in the same league, each team will now have their own version of Babe Ruth with the correct stats and ratings for that point in his career.
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2) Team rosters now include everyone who played for that team in that season. Last year's game only included opening day rosters, meaning that Nomar Garciaparra was on the 2004 Red Sox but missing from the 2004 Cubs. A lot of people use Exhibition Mode to do World Series replays — so it's important to have access to players who joined teams in the middle of the season.

3) The Scouting Report now has lines for 'Actual' and 'Sim' — right next to each other to make it easy to compare.
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Running Multiple Teams in Football Mogul

10/20/2025

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Dave Gardner of the Digital to Dice Podcast recently asked me a couple of questions about the newest version of Football Mogul:
​
Q. Can you control more than one team in Football Mogul 26?


A: Yes! When you start a new game of Football Mogul, you select one team. But it's easy to take control of multiple teams using the League Editor on the League Menu. You can change control from 'Computer' to 'Human' and back at any point. Or use the 'All Human' button to set all teams to human control.
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When you sim a week, Football Mogul gives you the option to play any game with a human-controlled team in Play-By-Play mode. Otherwise, the game will be simmed.
Q. Can I pick just the offensive plays and let the computer pick all the defensive plays?

A: Yes. The Options Dialog on the Tools Menu has a section for "Play-By-Play" settings. By default, Offensive Plays and Defensive Plays are both set to 'Manual'. But you can set one or both of these to 'Automatic' to let the computer do the playcalling.
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The option to "Require Click After Each Play" is useful if both the offense and defense are set to 'Automatic' — to let you read the results of each play before the next play starts.
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Moving Your Game to a New Computer

9/29/2025

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 These instructions are for Baseball Mogul but the steps for Football Mogul are the same.
Install Baseball Mogul on Your New Computer

Use the link provided in your original purchase. Because Baseball Mogul has no DRM (digital rights management), you won't need any special codes and you won't need to uninstall the game from your previous computer. (You have permisssion to install Baseball Mogul on multiple computers for personal use.)

If you can't find your original link, send us an email. Including the following will help us find your order:
  • Product bought (e.g. "Baseball Mogul 2025")
  • E-mail address used
  • Approximate date purchased
  • Order number

Copy Saved Game Files From Your Previous Computer

1. Open the installed version of Baseball Mogul and select "Open Game Output Folder" from the Help menu. This will open the folder containing your saved game files.

2. Open the same folder on your new computer.

3. Locate and copy all ".MOG" files from your old computer to your new computer.

4. Run Baseball Mogul on the new computer and click on "Resume a Previously Saved Game" to find your saved leagues. 
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Football Mogul 26 Delayed

8/23/2025

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Hi Folks!

Just posting to let you know that Football Mogul 26 will be delayed by about a month this year. I normally release it before Opening Weekend of the NFL season but this year I've spent most of the month visiting with my Dad.  After a bit of a health scare, his biggest problem now is boredom, so we've been watching baseball, playing cards and talking a lot.

I should have another update in early September.

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Estimating Pitch Counts

4/8/2025

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Back in 2003, Baseball Mogul simulated each game one plate appearance at a time. The simulation engine determined the result of each batter-pitcher matchup, but it didn’t simulate each individual pitch. Because I wanted to include realistic pitch counts, I needed to come up with a way to estimate the number of pitches thrown in each outing, based on the results of that outing. Baseball fans know that some at-bats end on the first pitch, but most last longer, with walks and strikeouts using up the most pitches.
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I wrote code to randomly generate balls and strikes for each plate appearance, with some interesting tweaks for realism. For example, batting averages are a bit higher on the first pitch than on later pitches of the at-bat, meaning that batters that get a hit will see fewer pitches — on average — than batters who put the ball in play but are put out.

Then I stumbled into an article at Baseball Prospectus where Nate Silver ran a linear regression on data from 2001 and 2002 to come up with a formula he called "Implied Pitch Count". His regression generated this formula:

Implied pitch count (IPC) = (3.17 * BF) + (3.44 * BB) + (1.53 * K)
(BF = batters faced)

I still have the following comment in my code:
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Additional Formulas
I went back and adjusted my sim code until the number of pitches thrown in an outing closely matched the result given by the Baseball Prospectus formula.

That same year, Tom Tango looked at more data and published a formula that he called the Basic Pitch Count Estimator:

Pitch Count Estimate = (3.3 * BFP) + (2.2 * BB) + (1.5 * K)

​In 2007, Brian Yonushonis used more recent data to create a new formula:

​(3.29 x BF) + (1.92 x K) + (2.04 x BB).
Simplifying the Formula
In 2020, I wanted to create a “pitch count generator” for Season Ticket Baseball. It thought it would be cool if you could include a pitch count in your box score without having to do a lot of extra math. When I played around with the numbers I found out that lowering Tango’s 3.3 number to exactly 3 and raising the other coefficients to exactly 3 provided slightly more accurate estimates for seasons in the 21st century. And they have the advantage of being integers, making the math really easy.
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This spreadsheet compares this formula to the formulas published by Tom Tango and Brian Yonushonis.
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For each season, we know the number of walks/game, strikeouts/game and pitches/PA. The ‘Estimate’ column shows the Pitches/PA calculated by the formula and the ‘Diff’ column shows the different between the real-life number and the estimate. (The next column shows the difference in percentage terms.)

Tango's formula is very good (only off by 1.37% on average) but it suffers a bit in this analysis from the fact that most of the baseball data I’m using was generated after his formula was published.

Anyway… using a coefficient of '3' for all the terms gives up the following super-simple pitch count estimator for Season Ticket Baseball:

Pitch Count Estimate = (BF + BB + K) x 3

Just add up the batters faced, walks and strikeouts. Then multiply that total by 3.
Strikes Thrown
I was curious if I could come up with a formula for the number of strikes in each plate appearance. The league average number of strikes thrown per outing is usually around 62% of all pitches thrown.
  • We know that every walk requires exactly four pitches that are balls. The estimator assigns 6 pitches for each walk, so we assume the other two pitches are strikes.
  • Every strikeout includes at least 3 strikes, but it can include more with foul balls. I decided to assume that
  • When the ball is put in play, that pitch counts as a strike. I assumed that the remaining pitches would be split evenly between balls and strikes.
This created the following formula for Pitches Thrown and Strikes Thrown that are included in Season Ticket Baseball:
  • Pitches Thrown = (BFP + BB + K) x 3
  • Strikes Thrown = (BFP + K) x 2
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