The Undo Button

What Diamond Mind Baseball Desperately Needs

The Undo Button

I’m upset.

Okay, I’m not really that upset. But I am a bit flummoxed.

Diamond Mind Baseball’s computer manager is guilty of making poor in-game decisions.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily show up when you automatically play seasons and look at macro statistics. You likely won’t pay a lot of attention to precisely when pitchers are being substituted for pinch hitters, and you probably won’t even notice that sluggers are occasionally removed for weak hitters in the late innings of close games.

However, if you stubbornly insist on playing each game yourself (like me), you’ll notice all sorts of problems.

And the biggest problem of all is that you can’t undo the computer’s poor decisions.

Examples

Here are a few recent examples of idiotic computer manager decisions, just in case you haven’t been following along.

First of all comes the most obvious — this one from yesterday’s post:

To refresh your memory, the Reds were up 3-2 in the top of the 9th inning. They had runners on 2nd and 3rd after Hal Gregg’s fourth ball wound up being a wild pitch. And the computer, in its infinite wisdom, decides to put Chuck Kress up there to hit for Ted Kluszewski.

This decision is so bad that I don’t even need to go any further. This simply would never happen in real life.

Cincinnati, by the way, lost this game. This wasn’t just a random decision that had no impact on the game. I think this decision helped Pittsburgh win in the end.

Want to see more? How about the computer using Dick Kryhoski to pinch hit for Cliff Mapes, who has been tearing the cover off the ball so far in April? That came in this game.

And we’ve also got gems like the computer manager’s complete inability to manage a pitching staff. This game featured a Washington Senators bullpen that looked like this before game time:

And who exactly am I supposed to start here?

There are more examples of poor managing coming — believe me.

Managing Both Teams?

I know that there are some ways around idiotic computer manager decisions in Diamond Mind Baseball.

For one, I could just manage both teams, the way I do with NPIII.

This doesn’t work so well in Diamond Mind Baseball, unfortunately. I would need to figure out a way to call for stolen bases, bunts, and pickoff plays without letting myself know what I was doing. Guessing right gives the defense too much of an advantage; meanwhile, outsmarting the defense gives the offense too much of an advantage.

This is much easier with the more “hands off” games like NPIII, which allow the players to make their own stolen base decisions, among other things.

Alternatively, I could decide to make roster decisions for both teams and leave other managerial decisions for the visiting team to the computer.

I actually did this a few years ago as part of an as-played 1920 project that I started. There are two problems with this approach:

• I forget that I’m managing the roster for both teams, and wind up not making obvious moves for the visiting club.

• I succumb to the temptation to make changes for the visiting team that benefit the home team, such as putting a horrible reliever in during a close game.

I’m worried here about biases, both overt and covert. I don’t want to do anything that could skew the results of my replay. All I really want is a computer manager that can do a decent job.

Wither the Undo Button?

Now, this has been an issue on the Diamond Mind Baseball forums for years. Over 20 years, in fact.

We the players have been clamoring for an “undo” button for years now. It’s not a complicated ask, by the way. All we’re asking for is a button to let us go back when the computer makes a stupid move and undo it.

The crazy thing is that simpler games have this functionality. Take the Skeetersoft NPIII computer game, for example. If I accidentally type in the wrong dice roll, I can undo it:

Seriously, is this really so hard?

Over the years, the explanation we’ve received from Diamond Mind has been extremely vague, a combination of “it’s too hard to program” (which is false) and “our customers will cheat” (which is irrelevant).

Frankly, it’s time that we had an undo button in this game. If we can’t get the computer manager to make more sensible in-game decisions, we need to at least have the ability to veto bad moves.

Until that change comes, I’ll continue to call out the problems that I see.