Overview
This guide is intended to help new and veteran players get the most out of Digital Diamond Baseball hereafter known as DDBB because I can. No doubt many of you have played baseball boardgames like Strat o Matic and APBA while others have played computer based baseball simulations. DDBB gives you the best of both worlds and best of all? You will never have to worry about buying seasons or whether seasons are available! Later on in this guide we’re gonna roll our own! So let’s “Play Ball!!”
Batting Practice: Covering the Basics
PLAY BALL!!
Let’s get this show on the road. This section will serve as an introduction to many of the game’s options including playing exhibition and season games, how to view reports, and a host of other features.
Playing Games
I am going to assume that you have just started Digital Diamond and that you have not yet installed any other Libraries and are playing with the included Great Teams League.
1. Select the Great Teams League and choose “Open.” You should be looking at a screen that has five “windows.”
2. Click on the Play Ball! window and choose Play Ball.
3. Two choices will open, “Scheduled Game” and “Exhibition Game” Please choose Exhibition Game.
You should now see the select teams option located in the upper left part of the window.:
4. Click on Away Team. Take a moment to scroll through the teams listed. This Great Teams Library demonstrates the many possibilities available for the player to create her/his own baseball “world.”
5. Select 1902 Pittsburgh Note that the game selects the team’s “ace” pitcher. You can change the starting pitcher by clicking on the Starting Pitcher Pitcher option.
6. Now follow the same steps and choose 1919-Chicago (A) as the Home Team and Eddie Cicotte as the starting pitcher.
Note that at the bottom left you have the choice to select whether or not to use a DH [Designated Hitter]/ Leave that unchecked for this game.
7. Let’s make it so that you are managing the 1902 Pirates and the AI is managing the 1919 White Sox.
Look at the right hand side of the window and you will see the options for assigning managers.
Click on the Managed by the Computer option for the 1919 White Sox.
8.Click on Set Lineups.
9. Let’s look at a few things here before we FINALLY play!
[Please click on this image].
You are looking at the lineup for the 1902 Pittsburgh Pirates. You can choose to look at the lineup in a number of ways. Right now we are looking at the Bullpen. (For those of you that are new to baseball in general, the Bullpen consists of relief pitchers). These guys rescue the starter when he clealry should have stayed home that day.
You can also look at the Bench – position players not in the starting Lineup, also known as “Riding the Pine.” You see a lot of options that will help you make imprortant decisions during the regular season. You’ll be able to see how your position players batted against left handed pitching for instance; useful information when bringing in a pinch hitter. We’ll cover the rest of these options in the Playing Seasons section of the guide.
10. Click “Play Ball!”
Playin’ Baseball!
Here we are ready to play in San Francisco’s beautiful AT&T Park. DDBB comes with a number of ballparks and logos designed by the devs. Because of copyright issues, they cannot sell the game with trademarked logos. That said, they are easy to find on the Internet. We’ll cover installing imported logos, extra ballparks, and player photos in an upcoming section of this guide. It’s also very easy to create logos. If there is a desire for a tutorial on logo design, let me know and I’ll create a guide for it. (LOL Guides for guides it seems)
DDBB is an insanely customizable baseball experience. You can even create or import your own Play by Plays! That too will be covered in an upcoming part of the guide. For now, let’s look around and get comfortable with the game’s main interface plus a ton of options.
Baseball, more than any other sport, generates vast amounts of statistics. Statistics plus a relatively stable rule set dating back to 1893 allows comparisons of player across generations. A .300 hitter means the same now as it did in Honus Wagner’s time. Text based baseball sims like DDBB use these stats to create player ratings. However, DDBB adds another unique feature; we’ll get to that in a few moments.
Let’s start by customizing the play by play area of the game.
Click on Options
As you can see there are a lot of choices for customizing your game.Most of the choices are pretty obvious so don’t be afraid to experiment. There are a couple I would like to mention.
I suggest that you set Show Batted Ball Location to TRUE. There’s no player nor ball animation in DDBB. By setting this to true, you can see where the “ball” was hit to. (Grammar purists: it is permissable to end a sentence with a preposition – oh happy day!!).
When playing games and seasons you can decide what stats should be shown on the field and in the hitter and pitcher sections of the game. If you’re a novice to the game., I would suggest setting both stat options to Real Life Stats.
Remember, you have the ability to replay tons of seasons so even if you’re a baseball fanatic as I am, real life stats help you to learn a bit about players you may never heard of. In fact, I’ll wager that only four other people in addition to me knows who Elmer Flick was. 😉
Ratings
Let’s have a look at the Real Life stats of Chicago pitcher Eddie Cicotte.
On the left side, click on Eddie Cicotte’s name. (In a later part of the guide, I’ll show you how to install player pictures).
Clicking on his name will bring up the following window:
We can see that Cicotte was a superb pitcher in 1919 with a record of 29 wins and 7 losses. There’s also a bunch of other statistics. We’ll get to them in a bit. I want us to focus on that area that is labeled Event Probabilities. This is a very cool feature in DDBB and a very important one. For those of you who have played dice baseball games, Event Probabilities are similar to a player card with all the possible outcomes listed. However, DDBB goes a step further! Let’s have a look. Please click anywhere outside of the player stats window to return to the main view.
You’ll notice that Eddie Cicotte’s and Claude Ritchey’s basic cards are there and under them, a section titled Matchup Event Probabilities.
Every player has his own Event Probabilities card. In DDBB, the pitcher’s card and the hitter’s card are combined, taking into account each players’ ratings to come up with the probable outcomes that could occur between the pitcher and hitter.
Look at the numbers in parentheses. Note that they are whole numbers ranging from 0 to 999. These numbers represent dice rolls that decide the outcome. Here I should tell the grizzled baseball sim veterans that DDBB allows you to roll your own dice just like in traditional dice and paper games.
Some of you may be thinking that you’ll be at the mercy of the RNG gods. However, unlike some role playing games, the dice rolls here are not as narrow. We’re playing in the era known as “Deadball.” That era lasted from 1893 to 1920 (Not that anyone cares but the Deadball era is my favorite). Home runs were rare. The name of the game then was speed and playing base to base. There was no DH and pitchers were expected to hit. Ahh the good ol’ days!
Look at the Matchup Event Probabilities and you’ll see that against Eddie Cicotte, Claude Ritchey would have to have rolled 996 to 999 to hit a tater, go yard, or whatever you want to call a home run. Conversely, Ritchey has a wide latitude of singles and other hits.
The pinkish area on the card belongs to Cicotte. But we can learn even more! The lower the number is in that area means that the hitter is not as easy an out, or, more precisely, the better chance he has against the pitcher he is facing.
I want to digress for amoment and talk about why this is important. Of the four major American sports, baseball is unique in a number of ways:
1. Unlike other sports, the defense has the ball
2. Great hitters like Cobb, Hornsby, Griffey, Jr., etc., FAIL 70 percent of the time.
3. Unlike other sports where you can go to your best player, in baseball, you must follow a strict batting order. In other words, you can only go to Mike Trout when it’s his turn to hit.
4. There is no clock in baseball. As long as you can keep the inning going and avoid that third out, you can keep trying to score.
5. Baseball is a much more defensive game
6. Unlike the other three major sports, there are no goals to defend or attack.
These six points are very important to the strategies and tactics of the game. Thus, it really helps to have at least an idea of what might happen during an at bat.
So, go ahead and click on players to see their stats. When you’re ready, click on “pitch” and play a game.
This is the end of the basics part of the guide. In the next part we’ll dig more deeply and talk about tactics and strategy. Grab a cold one and have fun!!
Digital Diamond Baseball (part 2)
Hey all, great to see you back here for DDBB part 2. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more content. As Steam is a global platform there are quite a few players who may not be familiar with baseball’s vast number of statistics, strategies, and tactics. For baseball veterans this second part will show you how to create your dream “What If?” scenarios.
See you soon!!!
UPDATE July 15th 2018: With the inclusion of fielding ratings I want to run a few impoets of these myself before continuing the guides. I do hope that you are enjoying DDBB. While I am working on the guide I urge you to go ahead and experiment! There are truckloads of seasons available for free including season replays as well as custom content created by the community. For instance I’ve created two libraries, The Best of the 1910s and The Best of the 1920s. (Yeah I know, really compelling names) LOL
The beauty of DDBB is that you can create virtually and sort of baseball “universe” you wish! Let’s say for example that you do not install anything and just play with the incliuded Great Teams League. The number of possible combinations you can create with these teams – including dumping all of the players into the Free Agent pool – is really mind boggling. Maybe you might want to see how Lou Gehrig would have done with the 1969 Mets. Perhaps you might want bring Honus Wagner into the HGH 90’s!
One of baseball’s enduring facets is the “Hot Stove League.” It got its name from the old days when people would literally sit around a hot stove during winter’s chill and discuss the upcoming season. It was also a place where conjecture took place. In a very real sense, the Hot Stove League was the grandparent of Fantasy Baseball.
So go ahead and experiment!! You can’t break anything! I’ll be back soon and in the meantime, please avail yourselves of the many videos created by the devs and also vist the DDBB forums!