I am not immune to self indulgence. Once a year, I whip off the covers of my simulation league set 11 years in the past. It was originally founded by the Astros resident Rasputin, Kevin Goldstein and still includes other baseball giants. It’s not just a sim league, it’s a sim league with cachet.

Before you run away, let’s pause to set some expectations. No, you won’t be able to use this information to win your 2019 fantasy league. However, if you were watching baseball back in 2008, you might enjoy reacquainting yourself with some forgotten names.

It’s a 20 team keeper league. We use a software called Diamond Mind Baseball (DMB) to simulate a full season and playoffs. Essentially, we’re playing a dynasty league where we already know how the players performed. Now we just need to manage them into the right spots.

It’s not so different from how we play normal fantasy baseball. We already mostly know which names are and aren’t good. So we let some humans bearing those names simulate stats for us.

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Later today, Sony San Diego Studios will have their most anticipated stream regarding MLB The Show 18 as they cover Diamond Dynasty – the game’s online mode. In my first video game piece here, I covered my hitter wishlist for ’18 and we’ve already seen a pair of them come through with Vladimir Guerrero announced a couple weeks back and Albert Belle revealed just this week. In fact, the developers have had a banner year in legend announcements and we’re still three weeks from release.

In addition to those two, we’ve also learned that Babe Ruth, Bob Gibson, Frank Thomas, and Mike Piazza are on the way. And those are just the uber-stars. I’m plenty excited to see the likes of Joe Torre, Troy Percival, and Benito Santiago get in the game. We’ve been told that 30 new legends in all will be coming into the player pool and 14 have been announced thus far. Check the running list here. My guess for this afternoon’s stream is a big 1990s-2000s era starting pitcher will be revealed. It’s purely a hunch/hope, but that’s where I’m planting my prediction flag. With that in mind, I want to share my top five pitcher wishlist which happens to include guys all from that era. This wasn’t just to match up with my prediction, I’ve had this list put together for a while now, but only recently finished the write ups due to some other projects taking precedent.

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This is the first iteration of a new regular column here at Rotographs about baseball video games, focused primarily on MLB The Show and Out of the Park Baseball. I’m looking at every other week here to start and then weekly during the regular season. Why video games? Well, because frankly these two games are legitimate iterations of fantasy baseball.

It is different than a 5×5 rotisserie league, obviously, but it’s still constructing teams under a set of parameters in order to be the best. OOTP is a pure sim that allows an incredible level of depth into creating your organization from the ground up. More on that brilliant game in future pieces dedicated to it. MLB The Show is dropping the first trailer for the 2018 version on Monday so I thought it’d be a great time roll out the debut. By the way, I’m looking to name this column so if you have any ideas of what to name a baseball video game piece, drop it in the comments!

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