A significant Hardball Dynasty update is coming very soon!

Engine Changes

1. Intentional walks will longer consume any pitches thrown.*
2. As regular season games enter extra innings, a ghost runner will be placed on second base to start each inning half.*
3. Position players may now pitch to save bullpen arms as games enter extra innings or when a team is trailing by 8+ runs. A new trio of managerial settings are in place to provide managers with granular control of this feature. Mopup pitchers will always be prioritized over position players.*
4. If a spring training game is tied after 9 innings, it will now end in a tie instead of extra innings.*
5. The minimum batters faced rules are now enforced. See the official MLB rules.*

Additional Changes?

1. The "Edit Manager Settings" page includes a new ruleset within Pitcher Settings to determine how position players should be used as mopup pitchers.*
2. The "User Settings" page includes a new "Position Optimization - Threshold" setting within the Advanced Setting grouping. This impacts position recommendations for players across all your worlds.
3. New roster size and pitcher limit rules at the big league level now match the new MLB rules. During the regular season and postseason, the ML team may have 26 players including up to 13 pitchers. During the Sept 1 roster expansion timeframe, the ML team have have 28 players including up to 14 pitchers. When a position player is demoted from the big league team, they must now only wait 10 "days". Pitchers must continue to wait 15 "days". As always, the waiting period is waived if they are being promoted due to an injury.*
4. The Disabled List has been renamed the Injured List.
5. A new "offseason" view is available on the Edit Rosters page intended to help owners during the offseason portion of the schedule.
6. Position players can now be placed on the 10-Day or 60-Day IL whereas pitchers may be placed on the 15-Day or 60-Day IL.*
7. Reactions are now available on the "World Chat" page
8. The "Free Agent Report" & "Waiver Wire" pages now allow you to include your ML players for easy comparison when making decisions on who to sign or claim.
9. An "Assistant GM" section has been added to the "Edit Rosters" page. It initially includes two features with more coming in the future.*
10. New internal Franchise support page feature to evaluate diagnostics from any Assistant GM usage.
11. Toggling worlds from the My Locker page now resets HBD cookies so you don't see seasons jump around between worlds (similar to selecting a franchise from the franchise dropdown in HBD).
12. When viewing the League Transactions or Player Profile Transactions pages, you'll now see contextual playing level associated with certain transactions. i.e. Promoted to AAA or Demoted to Lo A
13. Position recommendations are now consistent across the various areas of the game (i.e. player creation, player draft, rule 5 draft, Position Assignment page and new Assistant GM features).
    1. This includes stud players only playing one position, very good players being assigned a max of two secondary positions and lower quality players being the true potential utility type players.
    2. Logic to determine primary position is smarter, combining individual rating comparisons and overall rating comparisons. For example, a player that meets the threshold for all 5 ratings but total fielding ratings are < 10% of mlb averages will no longer be assigned the primary position.
    3. Logic to determine secondary positions utilizes the new position threshold setting. The combination in item 2 above is not enforced to maintain more flexibility with secondary positions.
    4. For example, we'll now see 3B that can play SS instead of always seeing SS that can play 3B.
14. Improvement to how Pinch Hit Hierarchies are saved. This greatly improved speed of new Assistant GM feature.
15. Added link to franchise-specific transactions page from Assistant GM results*

* indicates the feature is not available until the world is upgraded to Version 4. The plan is to selectively update a very small number of worlds starting a new season so we can limit the blast radius for any bugs that slipped out the door. We will then add logic so worlds are automatically upgraded during the season rollover process.

We also wanted to provide a snapshot of other features we'll be working on next:

1. Reducing the spring training period
2. Revamping the coaching process. More specialized coordinators, no individual minor league team coaches. We'll also begin to track coaches' impact on player development and expose in coach profiles.
3. More Assistant Game features including recommended promotions, demotions, free-agent signings and trade suggestions.
4. Fixing the existing logic tied to player recovery following an injury
5. Player development 2.0 - we'll be rewriting player development to be more inline with today's MLB
6. Introducing many new player and team stats. We'll initially add logic to track and then figure out all the great ways to surface in the game.
7. We'll also be targeting a few pages to re-design (World Office, Player Profile, Prospect Profile). This will likely lead to more.

These worlds should support any of the new features tied to world version:

• The Cool Papa Bell world is Version 4 and in the middle of the season.
• The Dirt world is Version 4 is in Budget Set mode.
• The Clemens world is Version 5 and near the end of its season.