If you want to play in a tried-and-true format and create your team right now, standard leagues (Classic and SSG) are open to the public 24/7. But if you want to try something different, Custom Leagues – created by customers – are there in abundance..

There are franchise leagues, progression leagues, captains leagues, high and low salary cap leagues, “rags to riches” leagues, alphabet leagues, place of birth leagues … the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Diamond Mind Online would not be the same if the Community did not include some of the most clever and prolific creators of Custom Leagues. We’ll be featuring one of these in this space each month.

This month we’re visiting with Tyler Ensor, the current commissioner of the Random Parks and Players leagues.

Tell us something about yourself: age, occupation, marital status, where you live, and interests (apart from DMO, of course).

I am 34. I’m a psychology professor at California State University, Bakersfield. My training is in cognitive psychology with a focus on human memory, but I was hired as a quantitative psychologist. As such, although I teach some cognition courses, I primarily teach statistics and research methods. I’m originally from Guelph, Canada, but now live in Bakersfield. Other than DMO and baseball, my interests include chess, reading (mostly fiction), cognitive psychology, and philosophy. Save for my cat, Dr. Whiskers, I live alone.

When did you start playing DMO and how did it first come to your attention?

I started playing DMO around 2020, but can’t remember a more specific date. I’m terrible at remembering when things happened! I found DMO after searching for sim baseball games. I’d wanted to play something like DMO for a long time, but I’m blind, and, as far as I can tell, all of DMO’s competitors are incompatible with screen-reading software.

You’re the current commissioner of the Random Parks and Players leagues, as well as being a regular participant in many other continuing leagues. Tell us something about Random Parks and Players.

This is a Classic league with a $130M cap. Each owner is randomly assigned a park and four players. Of the four players, one costs more than $16M, two are between $8M and $16M, and one is between $4M and $8M. These players must stay on your roster all season unless traded.
In real life, teams don’t get to pick their parks. Similarly, teams often end up with unfavorable contracts—players they’d dump if they could. I think of this league as a balance between that and IS. This league still offers a lot of flexibility: There’s a ton of room to find value and win, even if your four assigned players are bad values.

What do you find particularly enjoyable about the “continuing leagues” format?

I think what I like about continuing leagues is the consistency. You don’t need to worry much about waiting for a league to fill or finding a league you like. You already have one in place.

Is there any advice you would give to people who haven’t created a Custom League before, but would like to give it a try?

I think the main thing is to ensure that your league is sufficiently different from a Standard League and that it is relatively balanced. If your league looks a lot like a Standard League—and particularly if it’s a three-games-a-day league—people are unlikely to join because they can just join a Standard League.

It’s also important that league rules are relatively balanced. Perfect balance isn’t essential: The Random Parks and Players leagues can certainly tilt the playing field in favor of some owners over others, simply by virtue of the fact that some people will get more value with their four randomly drawn players. However, every owner in a league needs to feel as though they have the ability to put together a winning team.