Introducing PSA Plays MLB The Show

What better way to spend a few weeks inside than by playing video games? We’re all on the couch anyway, you might as well spend a few hours immersed in a digital world. With that in mind, my colleague Ryan Chichester and I are proud to present a new series, PSA Plays The Show.

We have no idea what the 2020 MLB season is going to look like. We don’t know when games will resume, if at all, or where they will be played. That loss of normalcy has underscored the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, but it doesn’t change the disappointment a lot of us are feeling over the potential of losing a baseball season.

In some small consolation, Ryan and I decided to simulate the entire 2020 season, in near-real time, and report on it the same as we would a real Yankee campaign. We’ll be sharing the results of the year with you, series by series, and covering league news, statistical tidbits and injury updates as they happen - and I’m sure Sony has built in some variation of the Weird Yankee Injury Curse.

We’re going to be posting this series twice a week, with one article recapping the Yankees’ performance and another analyzing happenings around our “league”. This weekend, Ryan will be simulating the first series of the year, including the hugely-anticipated debut of Gerrit Cole as a Yankee. I don’t know how it’ll play out, but I have a particularly good feeling about him facing the e-Orioles.

The Yankee roster we’re using is the default, and fortunately that means Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, James Paxton and Luis Severino are all healthy and ready to begin the season on the 26-man roster. We’ll try to run this season as realistically as possible, there are no forced trades or other engineering to build this squad into some kind of super team.

It’s been hard to be a baseball fan without real baseball, and it’s been even harder to be a baseball blogger without real baseball. Simming the season through The Show is an imperfect substitute, but it’s better than nothing. My thanks to our editors - Tyler, Caitlin, Jake and Ryan Pavich - for pushing for creative ideas and supporting silly things like this, and of course to Dan Brink for providing us with the graphics to make this series a little more aesthetically pleasing.

We’re on what should have been Opening Day, and it’s a sad thing that we don’t get to experience a real version of it. Starting this weekend, we’ll do as best as we can to mimic.