Baseball Mogul has a very cool feature called the League Builder. It lets you quickly fill a league with historical teams. You pick just two teams, or as many as thirty. You can add World Champions like the 1927 Yankees or 2016 Cubs. Or fill it with cellar-dwellars like the 1962 Mets. It's up to you. The problem is that previous versions of the League Builder had problems: 1) It was impossible to have two copies of the same player in the league. For example, Reggie Jackson won the AL MVP with the 1973 Oakland A's. He also helped lead the 1978 Yankees to their 22nd World Championship. But if you added both teams in the League Builder, Reggie would only appear on one of them. 2) Even when there weren't direct conflicts, many of the player ratings were inaccurate because of the way Baseball Mogul tried to combine players from different eras in the same league.
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Thanks to the volunteers at Retrosheet, Baseball Mogul now includes the correct league schedules for every season from 1901 through 2023. (These are the full pre-season schedules for every team, and don't include in-season changes caused by weather etc.)
Double Headers The addition of historical schedules required changes to the interface to support double-headers. For days in the future, the Calendar Page now lets you select whether you wish to play one or both games in Play-By-Play Mode. For games that have already been played, the scores for both games are shown:
Baseball Mogul 2023 includes more than 2.2 million lines of year-by-year statistics, including records from every level of the minor leagues, 55 different NCAA conferences, and 4 different summer leagues. I've also added season stats and biographical data for more than 2,400 Negro League Players. You can't yet start a new game controlling a Negro League team, because I haven't yet assembled the necessary team rosters and schedules. However, you can add Negro League players to historical seasons from 1920-1948 by checking the relevant box in the Player Settings Dialog (on the League Menu): For example, if you start a new game in 1927, the National League and American League teams will be filled with everyone who played for those teams in 1927 — and the Free Agent list will be populated with Negro League players.
As long as you keep this box checked (in Player Settings) Negro League players will be added to the league each year, in the season when they turn 18. One of the best things about Baseball Mogul is that it effortlessly loads saved games from previous versions. If the previous version was installed to the default folder (e.g. "C:/Sports Mogul/Baseball Mogul 2023"), Baseball Mogul should automatically find these files the first time you run the game, and ask if you would like them copied to the Baseball Mogul folder. Manually Copying Files You also have the option to copy the files manually: 1) Open the folder where the previous version (e.g. Baseball Mogul 2021) was installed. If you don't know what folder this is, run that version of Baseball Mogul and choose "Open Game Output Folder" from the Help Menu. 2) Open the folder where Baseball Mogul was installed. Again, if you don't know where this is, run Baseball Mogul and choose "Open Game Output Folder" from the Help Menu. 3) Copy all files of type "MOG File" from the old folder to the new folder. 4) Run Baseball Mogul and click "Resume a Previously Saved Game". Those files should now be available. Copying Files to a New Computer To move your saved games to a new computer, use the instructions above for Manually Copying Files.
You may have noticed that the feature list for Football Mogul 23 includes "New and Improved Replay Mode". Replay Mode is a feature I added for Football Mogul 21 that loaded every player's real-life stats at the beginning of each historical season. (You can turn on Replay Mode when you start a New Game, or toggle it at any time in the Options Dialog on the Tools Menu.) Unfortunately, the original Replay Mode didn't work exactly as intended. In some years, a player's season stats took a backseat to their overall talent level. In the following example from the 2000 season, the artificial intelligence is choosing Tom Brady as the starting QB despite the fact that Drew Bledsoe started every game behind center. If you're replaying the 2000 season, you want New England's starting QB to be Drew Bledsoe, not Tom Brady. Brady might be the GOAT. But for his first season, he was just the backup QB. This is the same screen with the improved Replay Mode in Football Mogul 23: It's weird to see Drew Bledsoe being graded 12 points higher than Brady. But that's the point of Replay Mode: to recreate a season using just the stats from that one season. The games might play out differently, but every player's performance is based entirely on their real-life stats.
As you can see in the above example, I've also added the ability to easily view a player's actual historical stats by choosing 'Predicted' in any of the Team Dialogs. Finally, Replay Mode now eliminates injuries to a player who hasn't yet played in the same number of games as he did in the season being replayed — giving every player the chance to replicate the performance that they achieved in real life. |
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