Baseball Mogul 2021: Replay Mode

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!