CUSTOM PENNANT BASEBALL

You never take the field

Hitting and pitching are the players' job. Yours is deciding who to draft, who to pay, and who to let go. After that you can only watch the players you chose win and lose. That is the general manager's job.

Every decision is yours

Draft — who to call. If another club calls the same name, it goes to a lottery

Contract talks — hold the line, pay the going rate, or spend to keep the roster together

Free agency — keep the players walking out, or sign someone else's

Trades — take the offer on the table, or make one of your own

The farm — develop, or win now

Usage — who sits on the active roster, and how they are used

The books — how the payroll is split, and whether to invest in the ballpark and the town

You can delegate the parts you find tedious. Delegate all of it or decide all of it — the year runs the same either way.

Every look can be replaced

You do not need to touch a file. It is all editable inside the game.

Club logo — drop in an image of your own. Scale and position are adjustable

Player portraits — one image per player. They show up in the roster list too

Emblem — pick a shape and a ground pattern. This is the face when no image is set

Cap mark — up to three characters, previewed on a player's cap as you type

Names — club name, the short form used in tables, the emblem mark, the home city

Club colour — it carries from the standings band through to the next-game card

None of it moves a single number in the simulation. Looks are looks; the sim is the sim. If you want to edit the players themselves, there is a separate screen for that, and it works on any club's players .

Nothing about the simulation is hidden

A league is one settings file. Club names, the players in them, and the rules that league plays by are all written there. Rewrite the text and you have a different league.

It is not only the names. Every number that drives the simulation is in that file, in the open.

How many clubs, and how they are split into leagues

Whether the designated hitter is used

Games per season

The liveliness of the ball

How often injuries happen

How players grow and decline

How active free agency is

Club market size and how budgets are handed out

So what you can build is not a league with the clubs swapped out — it is a world with different rules . A world where pitchers never break down, a world where nobody scores, a world where money decides everything. What you make is a single file, so you can hand it to someone as it is.

The format is documented in full with the game. No special tools required. Named presets are there for people who do not want to touch all of it, and the main rules can be changed from the new-game screen.

Scouts see through a fog

A prospect's ability is never shown plainly, and the fog is thicker on some attributes than others. Velocity comes through fairly well; fielding and plate discipline can be badly wrong. Your own players read a little clearer, because you see them every day.

The confidence of a report is deliberately not shown as a number. A number would look like it was right. It is put into words, in five steps instead. About one report in ten is off by more than ten points. That is where the steals and the busts come from.

It never ends

The club sets you a target, but the game will not end on you for missing it. There is a separate mode for people who want to be fired. By default the target is just a target, and there is no punishment.

The papers come out

Articles run as the season goes. They are assembled from what actually happened that year, and the writers do not sound alike. A local beat writer, a national desk, a sharp tongue. Nobody calls it a runaway unless the gap was real.

What ships with the game

This game comes with an original, fictional league . The players and the clubs were made for this game.