Assembling Eras

By choosing an era for your league, you decide whether you want to see dead-ball baseball (high batting averages, few homeruns, walks and strikeouts, lots of errors, many complete games), 1960's baseball (very low batting averages with moderate rates of walks, strikeouts, homeruns, errors and complete games) or modern baseball (moderate batting averages, lots of walks and strikeouts and homeruns, very few triples, almost no complete games and historically low error rates). You can choose other historical styles of play, or even some combination of styles.

If you are not already familiar with the role that eras play in Diamond Mind Baseball, or the factors that make up an era, this might be a good time to review the Overview of Eras topic elsewhere in the Help file. (Click on the Back button to return to this tutorial after reading it.)

For playing league games, you usually need only one or two eras in your database. Each league uses only one era, so if you plan to create only one league, you'll need just one era. If you plan to mirror the real-life setup of two leagues linked by an organization for post-season or inter-league play, you can use the same era for both leagues or use a different era for each.

You may find the eras you want are already in your database. If so, there's nothing more to do at this stage. When it comes time to assign eras to your league(s), you can choose from those eras.

If the eras you wish to use are not already in your database, you have several options.

The first is to import eras for your league from another database. The single most useful source is the Historical Era Database, which comes with your game. This database contains an era for every big-league season since 1894. To access this database open the Organizer window. Choose the Eras tab, click on the Import button, and then scroll down the list of databases. The Historical Era Database is at the bottom of the list.

In some cases you may not wish to use an era that DMB provides. Say, for example, that you are replicating a real-life minor league, or wish to average major-league norms over an entire decade rather than a single year.

In either case, you will need to research such factors as the durability of pitchers and the frequency of errors. Once you have your numbers in hand, two options for creating a unique era are available. You can create an era using the Organizer window. Or you can modify an existing era, using the same tool. (These links carry you to another topic in this Help file. When you have read one, click on the Back button to return to this tutorial.)