You may never get to manage in the major leagues, but with NetStats Baseball, you can get an idea of what it’s like. NetStats is a simulation of Major League Baseball that uses statistics from players and games from 1901 through 2009 as input to gameplay. You can play a game between any two MLB teams from those years, create your own teams from real-life players across various years, play a whole season game by game, or watch AI managers play an entire season in seconds.
NetStats Baseball lets you play against others by running under a client/server paradigm, letting two users, each managing a team, play across a network using a GTK-based client. You can run both the client and server on a single machine, playing against an AI opponent. You can also watch two AI managers play a game.
American developer and baseball fan Marshall Lake began working on NetStats Baseball in 1999. At that time, he says, he found no similar application of this type in the open source community. “I chose GTK as the user interface because it seemed to me to be easy to use. I also wrote several proprietary tools for downloading the data from www.baseball-reference.com and reformatting it. I entered the data from 1998 by hand with some help from proprietary data input software.”
NetStats Baseball is a hobby for Lake, so new releases don’t come out on any set schedule. He says future versions of the software will address bug fixes, tighten security, and provide improvements to the UI and to the user friendliness, but he doesn’t plan any major additions to the project. Still, Lake says, “I could use help with programming, testing, and data improvement.”