Baseball Mogul 2017

Baseball Mogul 2017 is a baseball management simulation that lets you start in any year from 1900 to the present day, using a favorite team’s full roster or creating a fictional team. As general manager, you build a club capable of reaching the World Series while competing with other GMs and negotiating with players’ agents.

Build and manage your team

Make trades and sign players to multi-year contracts, while managing the club’s finances. Set ticket and concession prices and sell TV broadcast rights to raise revenue; allocate spending to the farm system, scouts, medical staff and player payroll. Fans can turn against the team if it fails to win or ticket prices become too high, and poor financial management can leave the club bankrupt.

The amateur draft offers another chance to strengthen the team. Choose from high school and college players from around the world, bringing prospects onto the major-league team or sending them to the minor-league franchise to develop. Players’ abilities mature and decline as they age, so you need to balance the pursuit of free agents now with building for the long term.

Manage games

Set the starting defense, batting order and pitching rotation, then choose how closely to manage each game. You can watch from the luxury box and make calls to the dugout, or control individual players by selecting pitches and deciding when to bunt or try for an extra base. The game engine simulates each pitch using player ratings and more than 100 years of historical data.

You can manage day by day or have the computer simulate weeks or months at a time, following your team across virtual years or decades. Standings, financial statements and news stories track what is happening across the clubs in both leagues.

Modern simulations

Modern simulations cover 2017–2200. The game includes major- and minor-league statistics through the 2016 season, biographical data for every MLB debutant in 2016 and 326 additional minor-league players, and updated 40-man opening-day rosters. It also adds more than 600,000 lines of PITCHf/x pitch data and filters for correcting data errors during play.

Historical simulations

Historical simulations cover 1901–2016. Player ratings and statistical projections are derived using revised calculations that normalize statistics by season, defensive position and stadium, including individual averages and standard deviations. The historical models also improve fielding-error rates, pitcher endurance ratings and defensive ratings, particularly for designated hitters and pinch hitters. Additional data informs the player-aging model, with the aim of producing more accurate career paths in both historical and modern leagues.

Simulation and AI

The simulation engine updates player development at defensive positions, playing time at all levels, player health and injury rates, platoon advantages by player type, minor-league games and Win Expectancy data. It also changes intentional-walk logic and how fictional players are generated to support the long-term stability of the talent pool.

The computer’s team-management logic improves its choices of defensive starters and lineups, use of defensive substitutes, management of 25- and 40-man rosters over multiple years, and handling of pitching rotations. It also makes better selections of alternate starters from the active roster.

Interface and options

The Player Rating Editor updates predicted statistics dynamically when ratings change. The sortable statistics dialog adds 40-man rosters as a category, along with pitches thrown, strikes thrown, strike percentage, pitches per game, steal tendency and steal success. Scouting Report heat maps and the Play-By-Play screen are improved, and the League Builder is optimized to run about 400% faster. The game also addresses errors when converting between rating scales such as 50–100, 20–80 and 1–20.

Baseball Mogul 2017 automatically loads databases from earlier versions of Baseball Mogul.