Parks: Overview
Baseball is rare among professional sports in that the playing
field is not standardized. The official rules of baseball provide
for precise measurements within the infield, but only a few
guidelines for distances to the outfield fences, leaving room for a
wide variety of shapes, sizes, playing surfaces, building types,
and so on. Combine these physical variations with the effects of
altitude and climate in different parts of the country, and you can
easily see how a ballpark can exert a large influence on games
played there.
For this reason, ballparks play a large role in DMB. When
players are created, their raw statistics are adjusted for the
statistical impact of their home park. This (along with the
era-based adjustments) helps us create park-neutral ratings for all
players. And when you play a DMB game, the nature of the home park
plays a significant role in the outcomes of games played there.
These park adjustments add realism to your DMB games. If you use
the real-life rosters and the real-life schedule, the park effects
that are removed during player creation are cancelled out by those
that are added during game play, so the players will produce
statistics in DMB that are very consistent with their real-life
stats. If, on the other hand, you draft new rosters, many of your
players will be playing their DMB games in different parks than in
real life, and the change in parks will have an impact on their DMB
statistics.
This is the way it should be. In real-life, when a hitter is
traded to a hitter-friendly park, you expect their statistics to
rise even if their talent level doesn't change, and you discount
their real-life stats for the effects of their new home park. The
same is true in DMB. If you move a player to a new park that is
quite different from his real-life park, you can expect to see his
statistics be affected by this move.
Working with Parks
To create or modify a park, choose the View>Organizer command
to open the Organizer window, then click on the Parks tab at the bottom of the window. This displays
a list of the parks in your database. From here, you can click on
the buttons across the top of the Organizer window to create, copy
or modify a park. Each of these commands causes the following
window to display:
In DMB, the influence of a ballpark is reflected in the
following four groups of park attributes and ratings:
If you choose to create or modify parks, keep in mind that the
statistical park factors are the most important of these groups of
ballpark ratings. If you move a fence back by 20 feet, it won't
decrease the number of homeruns hit in that park unless you also
adjust the homerun factor. If you change the surface from grass to
artificial turf, it won't increase the number of extra-base hits
unless you also increase the doubles and triples factors.
Why not? Because we haven't yet figured out how to isolate all
of the things that affects the statistics produced in a ballpark.
How much will the rates of doubles, triples and homers be affected
by a 20-foot change in wall distance? By raising the fence by 10
feet? By putting in a new type of artificial turf? Adding a new
tier of seats that changes the wind patterns? Or blocking off the
center field seats so hitters can see the pitched ball better? We
don't know for sure.
But we can measure the overall impact of each park through
careful study of home and road statistics, and we can capture that
overall impact through the statistical park factors. If a park
consistently increases doubles by 30%, we can give the park a
rating that will produce a 30% increase in your DMB games. To that
extent, we don't need to know precisely how much each of the
factors is contributing to this 30% figure.
The DMB historical ballpark database
Once upon a time, anyone who wanted to create players in DMB had
to start by creating the home parks for those players. Statistical
ballpark information is not easy to find, so this could prove to be
one of the more time-consuming parts of the player creation
process.
To simplify the process of creating players, Diamond Mind has
compiled a historical database with the park dimensions and
statistical park factors for every ballpark that has been used
since 1901. This database is a separately-priced product that you
can purchase and install along with your DMB game. If you have
purchased and installed this database, you can use these historical
parks directly in the player creation and modification process, and
you can import any of those parks into your database so you can use
them in your own leagues. In short, you may no longer need to
create or modify your own parks.
If, however, you are creating players
for a fictional league, a foreign league, or one of the minor
leagues, or if you wish to use a park based on a range of real-life
seasons, you won't be able to use the parks in the historical
database. You can, of course, create and modify your own parks
using the DMB Organizer.
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