I'm the creator of Baseball Mogul, so I'm biased, but here are a few
thoughts.
1) If you are looking seriously for realism, I would steer away from
Strat-O-Matic. The SOM computer game is basically a 'port' of the card
game, and there is a lot of math that you need to do for maximum
realism that you can't do with card game. Primarily it has to do with
the interaction of batter and pitcher, but it also falls short on the
individual contributions of defensive players. I don't really have time
to go into the math here (maybe I'll write a book someday), but lets
just say that I've been writing both card-based and computer-based
baseball games since the 70's and card games can't provide all the
realism of a computer game. If you grew up playing SOM, you might find
the player cards more familiar than the Scouting Reports you get with a
game like Baseball Mogul -- but I personally find them distracting from
the fact that I'm trying to pretend I'm dealing with real baseball
players.
2) To my knowledge, Baseball Mogul is the only simulation that
incorporates Bayesian analysis into our projections. This is a somewhat
complicated statistical subject, but it means that players "revert to
the mean" in a realistic way, and that the DISTRIBUTION of player
performances over a season matches those that you find in Major League
Baseball. In "replay" sims that don't do this math, you tend to get too
many record-breaking performances -- or other unrealistic performances
(like a player hitting .600 against Lefties because he happened to go
3-for-5 against Lefties that year).
3) If you are interested in accuracy for recreating a SPECIFIC
historical season, you can't do better than Diamond Mind. Nobody
matches the research the folks at Diamond Mind put into each season
disk. The downside is the expense. You will pay more for one Deluxe
Season Disk (e.g. $24.95 for 1978) that you will for the entire
Baseball Mogul 2006 ($19.95). Baseball Mogul has licensed the Sean
Lahman Baseball Database -- so we include stats going back to 1901 (the
current version, however, isn't very good at simulating baseball before
about 1925).
4) If want control over the play-by-play action (when to pinch hit,
bring in relievers, etc.), choose Diamond Mind, OOTP or PureSim.
Baseball Mogul 2006 is just a "franchise management" game, meaning
everything after the first pitch is simulated. You can set strategies
in 18 different areas (such as how often to use the intentional walk or
defensive substitutions) but your interaction with the game itself is
limited to watching the play-by-play as it happens. For next year's
version (Baseball Mogul 2007, due out in March) we ARE adding a fully
interactive pitch-by-pitch simulation with the ability to choose
pitches and locations.
Finally, if you find it a hassle to actually run a league using
existing software, try out the new Baseball Mogul Free Leagues. After
signing up and clicking 'Join a Free League', you can click 'See all
Free Leagues' at the bottom of the next page. Then find a league with
many openings (there are currently some with 20 open teams, depending
on the size of your league) and tell everyone to join that league (for
example, it may have a name like 'Tuesday Free League 2', meaning the
league resets to Opening Day on Tuesday).
(If you want to run a Baseball Mogul Online with a full 30 owners, or
with a password to keep out other players -- you'll need to look into
our Premium Leagues, which cost money).
Clay
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