Introducing the Components
In assembling your league you will work with four basic
components: Eras, Teams, Parks, and
Players. When
you have these components in place, you can put them together by
creating one or more leagues, possibly grouped to form an
organization, and then creating the league schedules you need to
play games.
In this segment of the tutorial, we will focus on the decisions
you will make about which eras, teams, parks and players to include
in your database and how to assemble them.
An Era
determines several important aspects of the playing conditions for
your league games. Diamond Mind has created an era that reflects
the norms of performance for each real-life big-league season, as
well as a neutral era that reflects the norms averaged over the
past century. Each era specifies the level and type of offense
(walk rates, strikeout rates and the frequency with which batted
balls result in different types of hits and outs), how often
fielders make errors and how durable pitchers will be. For more on
how to decide which eras to use and how to get them into your
database, see Assembling
Eras.
A Team is
a collection of players that is assigned to play its games in a
certain home ballpark. For more on how to put together the teams
you want, see Assembling
Teams.
Each team is assigned to a home
Park. Ballparks play a very important
role in Diamond Mind games, since some parks (Coors Field) are very
friendly to hitters, others (Dodgers Stadium) have historically
favored pitchers and others have relatively little impact on games
played there. For more on choosing the parks you want to use in
your league, see Assembling Parks.
And, obviously, you'll need
to gather the Players you need for your
league before you can start playing any games. See the Assembling Players topic
for details.
Just because we're discussing
these components in this order -- eras, teams, parks and players --
doesn't mean you have to assemble them that way. You can work on
them in just about any sequence you please, and you can move back
and forth between them at any time.
The primary tool you will use to
assemble eras, leagues, teams and players is the Diamond Mind
Organizer. If you're not familiar with this tool, it may be helpful
to read Your Primary
Tool before you proceed.
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