Baseball Mogul 2006 Review

For a lot of baseball fans, it would have been a dream series, the Los Angeles Angels versus the Chicago Cubs in the 2007 World Series. In real life, I would have loved it—having been a heartbroken Angels fan from the days of Bo Belinsky until I became fed up after Donny Moore gave up that pitch against the Red Sox during the Gene Mauch years. For the record, I’m still a Cubs fan. Guess you grow to expect disaster when you root for the Cubs.

But I was the general manager of the Baltimore Orioles in this universe. I’d taken them from disappointment to contender. My only major transactions involved signing Atlanta Braves ace, John Smoltz, and free agent, Tim Wakefield, to shore up my weak starting rotation. I was using the farm system to build a contending team and having some success. I wasn’t expecting the Angels to break my heart, again—this time by winning—winning it all.

The game is Baseball Mogul 2006. It will remind baseball statistics buffs of their days of playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball with dice and cards or playing SSI’s stat-heavy Computer Baseball or one of the text-oriented Lance Haffner games on the Apple II. Baseball Mogul 2006 is no Earl Weaver Baseball with its life-like choreography or Tony LaRussa Baseball with its physics-based algorithms. It isn’t High Heat Baseball with its fabulous graphics and action component. EA Sports wouldn’t have dreamed of publishing it.

STILL LIFE WITH STAT TRACKER Baseball Mogul 2006 isn’t big on pretty pictures and the only on-screen movement is seen when text changes.

Baseball Mogul 2006 offers a very different experience from any of the games mentioned above. It is franchise management, not on-field management. It has the financial perspective and allows you to set everything from ticket prices to concession prices. It lets you determine the broadcasting package. Most importantly, it offers you the farm system of your dreams—a farm system with more depth than most players will ever be able to manage. It even offers the frustration that must be felt by a real general manager when the on-field manager doesn’t use his personnel according the rationale for which they were drafted (the player doesn’t manage individual game situations—just rosters).

The strength of Baseball Mogul 2006 is found in seasonal and, more significantly, multi-seasonal play. Gamers have to watch the franchise’s bottom line, plan for the future, and balance the roster for the current season. This means walking the tightrope between the proven performances of actual major league veterans (using actual statistics through 2004 from the Lehman Baseball Database) and the potential performances of one’s farm team (using detailed statistics modeled on high school, college and minor league play). As in real-life, one must juggle past performance against the entropy of aging, the probability of consistent performance, and the possibility of injury.

Spring Training [Basics of Play]

Each new season begins with free agency and arbitration, as well as an amateur draft. Once spring training is complete, you can choose to make decisions on a simulated daily, weekly, monthly, half-season or full-season basis. Since the program potentially sends pop-up trade offers on a daily basis until the simulated trade deadline, making moves by the week, month, half-season, or season means that you could have an entire chain of offers when the program finishes calculating the results.

AN OFFER YOU CAN REFUSE Don’t expect the computer opponent GMs to offer you any particularly outstanding deals. Most of the offers will come out of their farm systems in an attempt to extort name brand players from your roster.

One advantage of playing through daily results is that you have the option of viewing games via a play-by-play screen, complete with a text-based “broadcast” and audio sound effects. Viewing the results this way is interesting, but one shouldn’t confuse this with Miller Associates’ APBA Baseball for Windows 5.5 (a stat-based game that originally shipped with the Bill James Baseball Encyclopedia that lets you manage on the field in game situations instead of working from the GM perspective as you do in Baseball Mogul 2006) and its famous radio announcer, Hall of Famer Ernie Harwell.

Yet, there are two problems with this mode. First, if you select this mode without first finding the Options menu and selecting “My Team,” you’ll have to watch all of the teams play through the daily schedule. The second problem is that there are some places, in the very center of the screen, where the frame overlaps the text and obscures the message.

Heart of the Order [Details]

Both in “spring training” and once the season is actually in play, gamers will receive trade offers from the artificial GMs of other clubs. The AI for these GMs is extremely cautious. The trades are 99.9% stingy. Yet, here is the heart of the game. Can you be a better judge of talent than the built-in prejudices of the program? This judging of talent can either use the traditional (and relatively subjective) metrics of evaluating raw talent and potential (Old School) or use pure statistical performance metrics a la Billy Bean, the successful GM of the Oakland Athletics (Moneyball).

SCOUT MASTER Using scouting reports that offer career statistics plus program-rated intangibles, you can make informed decisions on trades, free agent signings and roster moves.

If you choose to GM like an Old School general manager (not a game feature, but a style of play), you can use the program’s built-in evaluation of players in eight categories: contact, power, speed, eye, arm, handling, fielding, health. These are all rated on a 100-point scale. Then, the simulated player (or real player, when based off the 2005 statistics) is given an Overall rating which expresses where that player is “playing” now (on that same 100-point scale) and a Potential rating which expresses the peak performance that the artificial scouts perceive that player being capable of reaching. A smiley, neutral or frowning icon gives the overall scouting recommendation for those who don’t want to pay any attention to the statistics.

If you GM like Billy Bean, the all-important on-base percentage (OBP) and popular slugging percentage for lineup players is available at first glance, but you’ll have to do your own calculations to get walk to strike-out ratios and hits per inning for pitchers. You won’t get any help in determining how patient a player is at the plate or how many average pitches a given pitcher will throw in a typical outing.

As for actual play, you get to develop a depth chart for your roster. This includes the preferred 9-man roster, bench, players getting the most AAA work and AA work in the minors, etc. Injuries can really make a difference with these preferences, so the game lets you set an interrupt for whenever you have a player injured for more than X (user-defined) games. In this way, even if you’re playing a half-season at a time, you won’t end up without knowing that you are losing your starting catcher for 15 games without being able to make a trade, free-agent signing or promotion from the farm club to make up for it.

In a similar vein, you can set your starting pitching rotation and even determine who is your closer, set-up man, alternate starter, and short, medium or long relief. In my games, this is critical. Whenever I stop play (whether I’m moving at a daily, weekly, monthly or half-season pace), I look at the pitching stats and change these priorities according to given performances. I rarely allow an earned run average (ERA) of over 5 to stay active once the season is a third of the way complete. I know that pure Sabremetrics fans believe that ERA isn’t a true measure of pitching performance because of the variability of the fielding performances behind the pitcher, but it has to be an important consideration when Baseball Mogul 2006 uses it as a primary performance indicator.

Box Score [Evaluation]

For some players, the lack of graphics in Baseball Mogul 2006 will be such a detriment that they won’t be able to get over it. To the statistics-oriented fan, Baseball Mogul 2006 offers a fabulous laboratory for testing their Sabremetrics approach to front office management (see the related strategy article). Of course, even the true aficionado will be taken aback by occasional problems with stadium measurements like confusing the site where the early Los Angeles Angels played with the site where the current L.A. Angels play. Such discrepancies appear to be rare, but they exist and will disappoint purists.

However, the depth of statistics and presentation of scouting information gives a wonderful opportunity to compare traditional scouting methodology versus a pure statistical approach. It would even be better if the statistical output files (the game creates a comma-delimited .csv file sorted to your specifications) had a few more basic statistics in them. I can open the file in Microsoft Excel and add columns to calculate stolen bases per inning and stolen bases per at bat, but I can’t tabulate the number of hits per inning that my pitchers are giving up without using the scouting screens. Yet, there is unlimited variety to what can be done with this game. You can save the game prior to the start of the season to be able to play the same season several times on a “What if?” basis. What if I had signed that expensive free agent? What if I chucked all of my expensive roster and just put in the best statistics-based minor league roster I could find? What if I shuffled the line-up constantly on the basis of OBP or HPI? If you’re at all like this reviewer, you will find yourself hooked.

Reviewer’s Snapshot: 8 (on scale of 10)

Accuracy 9
Replayability 10
Graphics 4
Software AI 6