Assembling Players
One of the most basic decisions you make when creating a new
league is choosing the pool of players who will participate.
If you are creating a new league using real-life teams, this is
easy. You simply gather the teams you want into a single database,
keeping their rosters intact, and play the season using those
rosters.
But if you are drafting new rosters -- onto real-life or
fictional teams -- you must assemble the players who will populate
your league.
One common approach is to work primarily or exclusively with
players from a single Diamond Mind season disk -- the 2003 season,
say. In this case, gathering your players involves releasing them
from their original rosters.
This can be done on a player-by-player basis by using the
roster
management window. This works well if you intend to place only
a few players from any particular team into the draft, but
releasing large numbers of players this way would be very
time-consuming. A better option in such a case is the release all players function, which, as
its name suggests, releases all players from their teams and
deposits them in the draft pool.
At this point, if a real-life player played for more than one
team in a single season, he may now exist in several incarnations
in your player pool: a partial record reflecting his performance
for each of his teams, and a composite record reflecting his
overall season performance. Running another Diamond Mind function
-- delete
team-specific records -- removes the partial player records and
leaves only the composite records in your draft pool. (You can also
prune your draft pool by deleting individual players through the
Organizer
window.)
If you are drawing your players from more than one season disk,
you have two options for gathering them. One is to import players individually from other
databases; this function copies the player for use in your league
while leaving the source database untouched. If you want members of
an entire team available for your league -- say, the 1927 Yankees
-- you can import the team. If
you then delete the team, its players will remain in your draft
pool.
Perhaps you'd like to be in the league yourself, or to include a
real-life historic player not available to you on another Diamond
Mind roster. With a bit of research, you can create a player. It's also
possible to modify an existing
player.
Now -- with your eras, teams, parks
and players all assembled -- it's time to put your league
together.
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