Many DMB owners participate in leagues with other owners of the game. It's a great way to increase your enjoyment by testing your skill at drafting players, negotiating trades, and managing your team in league games. And it's also a great way to get to know other baseball fans from around the country and the world.

There are a few of these leagues where all of the managers live near each other and can get together to play league games on a single computer. But most leagues use more than one computer to play the games because the league members are widely dispersed. Even local leagues often use more than one computer so they can be playing more than one game at the same time.

The commands on the Transfer menu provide you with the tools you need to run a league or play in a league where games are played on more than one computer. These tools enable you to transfer game results, statistics, injury reports, transaction reports, roster moves, and manager profile changes to they can be consolidated into a single DMB database and shared with the rest of the league members.

Terminology

In these topics, we'll use the term Commissioner to refer to the person who runs the league, the one who maintains the master copy of the League Database and periodically sends updates of this database to league members. And we'll use the term Manager to refer to the other members of the league, the ones who play the games. Of course, in most leagues, the Commissioner is also a Manager, but even if it's the same person, we'll use these terms to describe the role he is playing at a given moment.

And we'll use the term Play Cycle to describe a period of time that begins with the Commissioner sending out an updated league database, the Managers playing one or more series and then exporting the results of those series, and the Commissioner importing those results into the master copy of the league database.

Guidelines and Limitations

Some limits are necessary in order to make sure that the results of a Manager's games can be successfully imported into the League Database. If Managers were empowered to do anything they wanted to, the rosters and other information in their copies of the League Database would soon become out of synch with the master copy that is administered by the Commissioner.

The Commissioner is the only person who should make changes that affect which players are on which rosters. The Commissioner sets up the rosters and carries out any trades that are made before or during the season. When the results of a Play Cycle are imported into the League Database, the team rosters are checked for compatibility, and if those rosters do not agree, the results are rejected. The best way to ensure that results can be imported successfully is to have the Commissioner make all such player moves (trades, signings, releases) on the League Database between Play Cycles.

Managers can freely change the status of the players on their rosters -- moving players between the active roster, the disabled list and the reserve roster. And they can make any changes they want to their manager profiles. These changes will be successfully transferred to the League Database provided that players have not been added to or removed from the roster during a Play Cycle.

Copyright Violations

DMB Season Disks are copyrighted products. This means that you are breaking the law if you send a copy of your League Database to anyone who does not already own the DMB game and the DMB Season Disk upon which your league is based.

Suppose, for example, you are serving as Commissioner of a league based on the 2003 Season Disk. If you send copies of your League Database to the Managers in your league, you must ensure that those Managers are legal owners of DMB version 10 and the 2003 Season Disk. If not, you will be distributing copyrighted material illegally.

We can help you make sure that you are not inadvertently sending illegal copies of our copyrighted products to people who are not entitled to receive them. Send us a list of the Managers in your league, or tell us where to find that list on your league's web site, and we'll check our database of registered owners. We'll get back to you within a couple of days if there are people on your Manager list who are not entitled to receive the League Database.

In summary, we want you to play in leagues, and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to operate and play in those leagues. Use the Transfer tools to distribute your League Database, but make sure your members are DMB owners in good standing.

Non-commercial Use

Diamond Mind Baseball and related Season Disks are licensed for non-commercial use only. Running a business, no matter how small, in which you charge fees to play in DMB leagues is a violation of our license agreement.

Some DMB leagues collect dues to cover out-of-pocket expenses such as phone bills, postage, and web site fees. That is a very reasonable thing to do and does not violate our license agreement provided that the leagues are run as a hobby and nobody is making a profit or getting paid for their time.

Flow of Information

At the beginning of a Play Cycle, the Commissioner distributes an updated League Database that contains everything that has happened to that point in the season. When a Manager installs this updated League Database, he can view game results, look at any of the other reports (standings, leader boards, player stats, injury reports, and so on), update his manager profile, and play the games he's assigned.

At the end of the Play Cycle, the Manager exports the results of those games together with updated manager profiles (for the teams involved in his games) and any transactions (promotions, demotions, disabled list moves) that have been made. The information is written into a single Transfer File that is sent to the Commissioner by email or some other method. The Commissioner imports those results along with those of the other managers.

Whenever a Play Cycle is longer than a single series, the same team can be playing games on different computers in the same Play Cycle. That means that no one copy of the League Database contains all of the information necessary to track time-dependent data such as hitting streaks and fatigue. If your league has turned on the option to save game-by-game statistics, this time-dependent data can be reconstructed by the Commissioner at the end of each Play Cycle by scanning the game-by-game logs.

The Transfer menu also includes a command for rebuilding the database indexes. Most of you will never need to use this feature because it is done automatically. League Databases can grow to be very large, and larger files make for longer download times at the beginning of a Play Cycle. To keep those download times as short as possible, Diamond Mind Baseball:

automatically compresses and uncompresses the League Database files
gives you the option to exclude the game-by-game logs.
sends only the data files and automatically rebuilds the indexes of those files at the other end

To repeat, the rebuilding of the index files is automatic and is something you will probably never need to do. But the command is there just in case it needs to be done.

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