The Big Picture

By now you have assembled all the components for your league: the database that will contain everything you need to play games, manage rosters and track statistics; the era that will set the norms for batting, pitching, and fielding; and the teams, ballparks and players that will be involved.

Now it's a matter of putting the pieces together.

First you'll need to create a league -- or leagues, if you have in mind something like the current big-league structure. Each league can have a maximum of four divisions with 16 teams each. Each can have its own era, or they can share the same one. In creating a league you will also set rules for league play.

If you are creating more than one league, and envision either inter-league or post-season play, you will need to group your leagues within an organization. There can be only two leagues within an organization, and only one organization within each database. The rules of the organization will govern play for the leagues within it.

The next step is assigning your teams to leagues and divisions. No team can be assigned to more than one league at a time, so you may need to free teams from another league to make them available for yours.

Next comes assigning players to teams. If you are simply assembling real-life teams into a new league structure, this task is already done. But if you are building or tweaking your own rosters, you can assign up to 80 players to a team by running a draft, making trades or signing them through a team's roster window.

Before playing games in which you use the computer manager or the Quick Play option, every team must have a well-crafted manager profile to guide the computer manager in its decisions about starting pitchers, starting lineups, tactics, and substitutions. All Diamond Mind Baseball season disks include manager profiles, so if you have imported a real-life team from another database, chances are it already has the manager profile it needs. And if you built a team using the computer drafting option, a manager profile will have been created for that team automatically. If, however, you built a team by hand, you will need to generate a manager profile using the Generate manager profiles command on the Tools menu or create one using the tools in the Roster/manager profile window. In any case, it never hurts to review the manager profiles for each team and make any necessary adjustments.

The final step is generating a schedule for league play. You'll determine such factors as how often teams should face their intra- and inter-divisional rivals. DMB will take care of the rest -- leaving you ready to play ball.