Projects for Baseball Mogul

When I began the "Even the Braves" dynasty in 1953, I was surprised to find that after about a year, Willie Mays hadn't shown up. Now I'll admit that I don't know absolutely everything to know about baseball -- for example, I don't know when Willie Mays made that wonderful facing-the-wrong-way, over-the-shoulder, turn-around-and-spin, make-the-incredible-throw-home that we've all seen before. Was it before 1953? After 1953? When? (Answer below if you don't know.)

I waited for Baseball Mogul to toss him in to the game in the Amateur Draft, but Mays never showed up. Later, I figured out why. According to Wikipedia, Mays spent part of 1952 and all of 1953 in the Army. There was a war on, and he was drafted for service in Korea, but never served. He would return to the majors in 1954 and resume his career.

Unfortunately, this causes a problem for any game universe which starts in 1953. Mays, simply, never shows up. As he's not in the list of active players in 1953, he will never exist. Lahman/BM isn't smart enough to figure out that Mays has gone missing and to put him back with his team or somewhere -- anywhere -- in 1954.

I don't know if OOTP treats 1953 dynasties the same way. I'm sure that if I had been aware, there would probably be a way that Mays could be returned to the universe, but it would probably involve some laborious process and I want a quick-and-easy solution. (If you have the "easy" solution, please let me know.)

Therefore, it would be a real service to include one of the following mods to the Lahman database. You could call it the "advanced Lahman database". Or, at the very least, create separate spreadsheets for the following modifications.

1. Players in wartime. I feel very sorry for someone trying to start a Baseball Mogul dynasty in 1944. DiMaggio and a score of other ballplayers will never show up because they've gone to serve.

Players serving in World War I, World War II, Korea, or even Vietnam (if there are any) have the potential to be affected. A spreadsheet should be made available of at least the names of players in the military and when their periods of service lasted.

There's a site called Baseball in Wartime which lists all Major Leaguers who served part of their career in World War II. The interested Moguler would know which players disappear -- or should disappear -- and then come back. (Perhaps one could give DiMaggio a two-year long "injury" that would at least keep him out of the game for a period, for those playing pre-1943 dynasties. It would be a great historical resource.)

2. Proper minor-league names. Every start a dynasty in 1902 in BM only to find that your minor leagues are stocked with teams with names like the "Lugnuts" or the "Jaxx" or some anachronistic modern name? It would be a simple task to compile a list of minor league teams appropriate to the era. As Baseball Mogul's minor league system consists of five fields that one can fill in, it should be simple to add a program that loads the right name and designation for whichever year one cares to start one's dynasty.

(As for OOTP, I've not played it long enough to know if the program loads those completely-incorrectly-named minor league teams. At least post-1969, it shouldn't be too hard to get the engine to put minors in the right places.)

I'd do the spreadsheet work myself, if there was any demand for it.

3. Players by ethnicity. A loaded topic even in the best of times. However, it would be nice to know for 1940s dynasties who is the first black player to play in the major leagues. Or who the best Latin players were for any particular time period.

Ethnicity is largely a self-identified matter, although some players gladly identified themselves as being great black or Latin players. Obviously, Baseball Mogul won't tell you who is black and neither will OOTP (OOTP will simply assign a race -- often wildly inappropriate -- to a player. I have a white Dwight Gooden in an OOTP dynasty, for example.) A spreadsheet could indicate the race of a player, provided with an asterisk to indicate whether or not the player was "self-identified" or rejected a racial identification during his career. (I believe that some Cuban blacks "passed" as whites.)

Anyway, I doubt we'll be seeing any of these features from either Baseball Mogul or OOTP any time soon. If we want the mods, we'll have to do them ourselves.

(About "The Catch": you can go here to find out all about it. It occurred in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series.)