[Erich Ingram]

Folks,

I want to first of all apologize for the delay in the release of this set. I will take all the blame for it as I have been working on it for a couple of months now and much to the chagrin of mssrs Duffy and Heinsohn I did not complete it in time for release of the game. I can get into the reasons why but that is better just left alone for now and I will say that I am working dilligently at getting it up to the standard that I have held my files to in the past. Unfortunately I lost most of the day today due to having two of my three daughters being sick.

As for a release date, I do want to say it will be very soon for the first version to come out for it. I will also say that I have built the teams to have all the players for the Opening Day Rosters from MLB down to A ball. Rookie and Short Season have not yet been included due to the fact that their Opening Day rosters have not been designated yet as they do not start until after the draft has been completed. There are over 4000 players on the teams and another couple thousand inside the file that are not on teams.

Presently I am working on putting all the players at the correct levels of minors as when importing from the spreadsheet format it doesn't do that(something I have discussed with Markus and which he has told me we will not be able to rectify). A few players still need to have their ratings tweaked(mostly minor leaguers, and generally just top Prospects), also there are a bunch of players that need to have their outfield arms corrected due to an importing issue.

Salaries have been correctly added for some teams but not all yet. That is probably not an area that I am going to hold up the initial release for unless people want me to do so.

Home cities/countries are updated for about 60% of the file. We will be cleaning that up as well as we go along.

Now I will also be setting up another thread that will be strictly for players that you think are missing, mis-rated, on the wrong team or if by chance you were to find duplicates. My one request with that thread will be that you put in solid reasons as to why a player should have a different rating. I don't just want to see that player A should be rated better at this position or such just because, but I will say that there will be times when people will have valid reasons why a player should have different rating and I am willing to listen to what people have to say.

Now I know many of you will want the roster set to be up-to-date with all transactions, but that is not the direction that I am going with this file initially. There will probably be a time that a second file will be put out as well that will be updated but personally I find that I want to start the 2006 season with players on the teams that they started the 2006 season on.

I do plan on adding in the Rookie and Short Season teams once the rosters are set, and I may try and add in the draft picks to the Opening Day set as draftable players.

Now throughout this whole post I have used the pronoun I, while the top of the thread has both myself and Cubby in it. Cubby and I are working together on this file, he has been a large help in cleaning up the initial grunt work that I had to got through to get the file to place that could be workable. He and I will be working together going forward on this project as we add in more things. For those of you that know the international leagues please PM me as we are going to be looking for a bit of assistance on that. As it is right now, thanks to FidelMontoya I do have a great website for Japanese baseball and thanks to Scott Vibert I am going to be getting some information on a couple of other things, but I am still going to be looking for assistance with other foreign related leagues.

Now I could keep on typing here but I have to get back to destroying the Yankees, I mean updating the NL West.

Please understand I want the rosters done as much as all of you do, I have had the game for awhile and haven't played it in probably 6 weeks as all I have been doing is creating players.

Thank you for your interest and patience.

Erich