The Death of Diamond Mind Baseball
A Short History Lesson
The Death of Diamond Mind Baseball
I bet you weren’t expecting this title, were you? After all, Diamond Mind Baseball is clearly alive today. In fact, a new patch for Version 12 came out not long ago. So what’s this all about?
Well, as sad as it is to report this, the truth is that Diamond Mind Baseball is a shell of what it once was. This baseball sim was once the darling of the sabermetric community. It was treated as the sim – the only game that serious students of baseball would turn to for answers to their lingering questions about baseball history and strategic philosophy.
Those days ended, sadly and suddenly, in the 2007 to 2009 period. And I was active on the forums when it happened.
The Acquisition
Veterans of the Diamond Mind Baseball scene will ascribe its death to Tom Tippett’s sale of the game to a young business school graduate named Dayne Meyers back in August 2006.
We first heard of this sale in the long-discontinued Diamond Mind Baseball newsletter, a publication that was once issued bi-monthly and was filled with Tippett’s unique insights and experiments. You can still find that old newsletter here.
At the time it looked like nothing would change. In hindsight, though, the phrasing here is a bit suspect:
The Clamor
If you read that old newsletter, you’ll see all sorts of promises about future versions of Diamond Mind Baseball. There was a promise in some of these old newsletters about a patch for Version 9,
You can’t find those posts anymore, unfortunately. Throughout 2007 and into 2008, the posting was hot and heavy. New CEO Dayne Meyers did what he could to alleviate the situation, but wound up making things worse – including participating in a number of really bizarre chats and other forum shenanigans.
You know you’ve got a problem when you’re seeing official announcements like this from the company:
As we quickly learned at the time, the truth is that Dayne wanted to increase the userbase his online-only version of Diamond Mind Baseball – and the strategy appears to have been to bleed the PC game as a sort of sacrifice.
Diamond Mind Online
I’ll save you my editorial thoughts about the online game for the moment. As I recall, Dayne either told us directly or clearly implied at the time that he felt the future was in online games that played closer to fantasy baseball than the sort of simulations that we all love and enjoy.
With 15 years of hindsight, I think we can say that this was actually somewhat true. We know, for example, that OOTP’s Perfect Game has been very successful from a commercial standpoint. I don’t think we can necessarily say that Diamond Mind Online has been an equal success, however. You might be able to prove me wrong, but I’ve been unable to find any independent reviews of Diamond Mind Online anywhere on the internet. I haven’t tried it for myself, but I am quite convinced that it lacks the graphical interface that OOTP has – and it certainly has nothing quite like the same userbase.
The funny thing, though, is that those of us who liked playing PC-based simulations 15 years ago are still playing these games. The market for this type of sim didn’t simply die out when online play became commonplace. It does make you wonder why somebody would want to slay the golden goose.
Aftermath
You might have noticed that there are two Diamond Mind Baseball forums. Well, three, actually, if you count the mostly empty Delphi Forums version. There’s the “official” forum, which has largely been ignored by the community, and the “fans” forum, which is active – though nowhere near as active as it once was.
This division happened for practical reasons at first (namely the banning of numerous prominent board contributors), but later became quite symbolic. It was, and still is, a good representation of the lack of connection between the company and its own fanbase.
And yet here we are today – playing the same game, and telling others why it’s every bit as good now as it was 15 years back.
Regrets
After all the years have gone by, and all the shouting has died down, I’ve got a few regrets about this whole incident and controversy. I’m happy that the PC game still exists, but I feel like we’ve lost a lot in the process.
I miss some of the old board members – particularly those with high level statistical and historical analysis abilities.
I miss the once burgeoning season homebrew community. The 1924 homebrew season is still one of the greatest fan-created modifications in this hobby, in my opinion.
I wish the sabermetric community would come back – many of the handmade “simulations” certain members have used to prove points are really lacking in realism.
Most of all, I miss all the games I could have been playing while I was running around arguing on message boards. I largely left Diamond Mind after the ugliness had quieted down, and feel like years were robbed from me.
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