Baseball Mogul has been around for quite some time. The mid to late 90s was a dark time for videogame baseball fans. When it first hit the scene back in 1997, it was a breath of fresh air for gamers who were growing steadily tired of arcade all sizzle but no steak games such as the now defunct Triple Play Baseball series. Baseball Mogul came along and while it wasn't the first text based baseball sim it was definitely one of the first to attempt to simulate baseball through the eyes of an owner rather than to be solely a statistical replay sim like Diamond Mind Baseball and its ilk. A lot of text games today from Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) to Front Office Football owe a debt of gratitude to Baseball Mogul.

However, over the years the franchise has stagnated. It went from being an innovator to also-ran and failed to keep up with more polished and detailed sims like OOTP and PureSim Baseball. Last year, Mogul 2006 made some small steps in recapturing the old magic but it still wasn't enough to draw people away from games with better interfaces and greater feature sets.

After tooling around with a Beta build of Baseball Mogul 2007 it appears that the series is finally taking the necessary strides to get back into the text based baseball picture. It still has some issues and the interface remains problematic but Sports Mogul Inc. is clearly no longer simply going through the motions. That said, there are newly included features that are such a long time in coming that it's hard to get too worked up about them. For example, the "new" trade block feature is pretty much a staple in most text sims today. Also being touted is the new "lefty/righty" split stats. These are features that baseball text sims must have, so the fact that Mogul is just getting around to them should give you an idea of the uphill road that it has to climb to get back to respectability.

There are some bright spots, though. Baseball Mogul 2007 is now has the exclusive rights to the Sean Lahman Baseball Database, so you can start a game of Mogul as far back as 1901 and get all of the real players from yesteryear and the appropriate incoming rookies. This is quite the coup for Baseball Mogul as a big part of OOTP was using the historic rosters.

There are some other tweaks such as additional player personalities, more detailed hitter ratings (although you still don't see ratings for lefty/righty match-ups), and expanded roster tools (you may also create a fictional league with custom teams and computer generated players), but the feature with the most meat is the new game day engine. In the past Baseball Mogul was strictly a sim game where you simulated days of the week with no ability to actually manage individual games. In an attempt to keep up with the Jones', Baseball Mogul 2007 now features an interesting, although still rough, pitch by pitch mode. You can decide exactly which pitch to throw as well as its desired location. It's actually a pretty well conceived idea – the problem with this mode in its current state is that while you see a batter in the batter's box, swinging away at pitched balls, you never see the fielders and thus have no idea of knowing if a ball is a hit or an out without having to look off screen to read the bland text description. A pitch by pitch mode with rudimentary graphics can certainly work in a game like this; MicroLeague Baseball did this nearly 20 years ago, but in that classic game you saw the action on the field and not just a batter swinging. I admit I'm a bit disappointed that you merely see the batter and pitcher and never get a sense of the rest of the team on the field but this mode does have a tom of potential.

The Beta of Mogul 2007 was still a bit rough around the edges, but there's no denying the fact that this version is taking a rather big leap in terms of scope. Whether or not this new version will be a big enough advance to pull people away from other text sims is yet to be determined. It's too early to discuss the critical parts of the game such as long term statistical consistency and accuracy as well as other items such as trade AI, but those who have dismissed Baseball Mogul the past few years should definitely keep an eye out to see how this latest version shakes out. - William Abner