Every year I get excited for the new Baseball Mogul to come out, and every year I am disappointed with the end result. Baseball Mogul 2008 is no exception. For those who don’t know, Baseball Mogul is not a game where you actually play with a controller, but it is a baseball simulation. All 30 MLB teams are included, with real players, and it is your job as general manager to set ticket prices, concession prices, add or subtract to your Ball Park, trade, sign, and release players, negotiate contracts with free agents, and build a dynasty for years to come. You can also make each team have the same payroll, so that teams like the Devil Rays can actually compete with the Yankees. Another cool feature is that you can edit the ball park’s name, location, capacity or just move your team to another ballpark which you can create.

On the Team Tab at the top, you can set lineups for use against right handed pitchers with a DH, left-handers with a DH, and both right and left-handers without a DH. You can set your pitching rotation, assign middle relief, setup, and your closer assignments, and you can implement what players you want at each position.

You can also implement strategies for your team to use during game situations. For example for your hitters, you can be more aggressive with the hit and run, sacrificing runners over, or the squeeze. When on base, you can be more aggressive with trying to stretch singles into doubles, you can steal, or tag up, and for pitchers, you can tell your guys to pitchout more often, intentional walk or pitch around someone dangerous. The flaws to these settings are that, you cannot assign each individual pitcher these settings, but your staff as a whole.

Your infield can be set to guard the lines more often, or have them play in, and for late game situations you can have your team pinch hit more, pinch run more, and throw in defensive replacements. For pitchers you can have them start on short rest more often, or pitch through trouble, and have high pitch counts. Again, this isn’t that great a feature, because someone like Curt Schilling you’d want to give him the option of pitching out of trouble, but someone like Tim Wakefield, or Julian Tavarez, you might want to yank.

You have the Players Screen, where you can find players in the league, look at free agents, conduct trades, or see who is on the trading block. The news screen, allows you to view standings, your team’s finances, the league leaders, headlines, the calendar of games, view playoff seedlings, and transactions during the year. As far as simulating your season goes, you have the option of playing one day at a time, one week at a time, one month, half a season, or just simulating right to the playoffs. This is all well and good, but to try and complete one season is like trying to run faster then a car can drive. There are many glaring problems with this game, which to me is unacceptable because the game is a supposed to be a simulation, there really should be little to no bugs.

One of the most glaring absences from Baseball Mogul is that the rosters are not updated like they should be, or they are missing players. At the start of the year, I looked at my roster, and found half of the roster in the minors! The game came out in April; you’d think they would at least have ninety percent of the players in the correct league. I can understand maybe one or two, but half? I do not know if Dice K Matsuzaka is part of the players union, but MLB 07 for the PS2 or MLB 2K7 for the 360 at least tries to put him in by giving him a phony name, which you can then edit. There is nobody in the game resembling him at all, yet his trademark pitch is there….

Mogul has minor league players, but the amount is inadequate. The players are major league players who did not make the team out of spring training. They should have just left that option out all together, rather then adding 6 or 7 players and saying that the minors are included. During my first season, I had my whole starting rotation injured, plus half of my starting lineup for more then 20 days, but because I only had a few players in the minors, I had to go and sign free agents who are worse then my grandmother. Doing this, put me into debt, and at the end of the year all my free agents were released without giving me the chance to negotiate due to my team being in debt. The amounts of injuries that occur are horrifying and disturbing. Every other day someone will miss 6-30 days on average, with sprained fingers, scraped knees, twisted ankles, pulled hamstrings….it’s worse then last year’s Red Sox team if that’s even possible.

I also don’t understand, how this is the only game (which for some reason) failed to put in this year’s correct schedule. The Red Sox opened the year up in Kansas City this year, but in my game opens the year up in Baltimore… Why do the console games have real schedules, more players, players who are in their correct leagues, and this one does not. Sony and Take Two have a lot more things to do and go over because their games are on multiple platforms (just Take -Two), and all Sports Mogul has to worry about is the PC. Not acceptable.

One cool thing you can see while on the calendar menu, is a running ticker at the bottom of your screen giving you quick glances at the standings, and tidbits about baseball history. The only problem is, if you’ve simulated a week or a month at a time, the ticker does not keep up with you. The Sox might be 18-10, while the ticker has them at 3-1.