LGDRAFT info

lgdraft.exe was created and written by:

this file was also written by bill, please contact him with any questions or comments.

Introduction:

This utility will scan a BBW season disk, and create a suggested set of team rosters for any number of teams that you specify. The teams consist of 26 players, broken down as follows:

5 Starting Pitchers
4 Relief Pitcher
1 Starter/Reliever (mostly a reliever, but started over 10 games)
2 Catchers
2 First Basemen
2 Second Basemen
2 Third Basemen
2 Shortstops
6 Outfielders

The utility uses a proprietary algorithm to rank all players on the season disk according to a variety of offensive or pitching statistics, and will then distribute the players across the number of teams that you specify. The goal is to create all the teams as evenly matched as possible, i.e. you should not get a Babe Ruth and a Lou Gehrig on the same team. It's not perfect, but I'm still working on it.

Version 1.02 of this utility will only write the suggested rosters to a text file. See the "Future Enhancements" section below for what future versions of this program will hopefully bring.

Background

Ever since I bought my first copy of Miller Associates' "Baseball for Windows" a couple of years ago, I've found myself to be much more interested in creating my own draft leagues and managing one team for an entire season than I was in season replays. One of the most time-consuming tasks was to actually setup a list of all the players on the season disk that I was using into a spreadsheet, apply some calculations to rank the players based on their offensive or pitching statistics, draft the players onto teams, create the pitching rotations and standard lineups, etc. Once I started playing the actual games, the rest was easy.

Shareware utilities, such as Phil Murray's "PMBBWOUT" statistics export utility, helped automate part of the process, but still left a lot of time-consuming work for me to do. So I decided to write my own utility to do automate as much of the process as possible. This "League Draft" utility is the early result of this effort. Version 1.00 is a very crude first step, but I thought that maybe it might be worthy of posting as shareware for others to take a look at and try for themselves.

How To Use

1) Create a new subdiectory on your hard drive to copy the "LGDRAFT.EXE" program to. A subdirectory "LGDRAFT" under the BBW100 directory might be a logical choice (i.e. "D:\BBW100\LGDRAFT".

2) Copy the "LGDRAFT.EXE" program to that subdirectory.

3) From a DOS prompt, change your current directory to the "root" of a season disk directory, one which contains the "PLAYERS.DAT", "NSTAT.DAT", and "PSTAT.DAT" files (i.e. "D:\BBW100\1927.WDD").

4) Execute the program. You will be prompted to enter a desired number of teams to draft, as well as an output text file to write the rosters to.

5) Print or view the output text file to see the rosters of the teams that the program has drafted.

Future Enhancements

Version 1.00 is very crude, by my own admittance. In my own defense, please be aware that this was created in only about one week, from the time I first came up with the idea to the time version 1.00 is now being posted. This week includes the time that I spent deciphering the layouts of the "PLAYERS.DAT", "NSTAT.DAT", and "PSTAT.DAT" files, and also the time I spent refreshing myself with the C programming language (it's been about 4 years since I've even looked at C). But I am planning to continue enhancing the program with (hopefully) the following features:

automatically create team rosters for the BBW programs to use
add a Windows interface
automatically create standard lineups (DH/non-DH, LHP/RHP, etc.) for the BBW programs to use
anything else I can think of
anything else you can think of

Revision History:

v1.00 (12/24/1996):

initial release

v1.01 (12/30/1996):

added pitching and hitting statistics to roster reports
program now prints list of all undrafted players after printing team rosters
slightly modified ranking algorithm
modified program to prompt for number of teams to draft
modified program to prompt for output file name
fixed floating-point (division by 0) error for players with no plate appearances

v1.02 (01/07/1997):

fixed problem where relief pitchers were being drafted twice by the same team when only one team roster was being drafted
modified output to print player names as 32 chars instead of 20 chars

Feedback:

Feedback is already encouraged. If you have any comments (good or bad), questions, suggestions, etc. about this utility, please pass them on to me. Please send any feedback to the following email address:

bill_gallagher@prodigy.com

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