Diamond Echos was created to preserve and honor historical events, great players and record-breaking performances. We'll focus on baseball history between the 1880s up to 1999. What separates baseball apart from all other sports is its unique history.
Baseball cannot lose its history or it loses part of its soul.
Today's version of baseball is so involved with launch angles, spin rates, velocity numbers and analytics beyond anything anyone could ever of imagined. With so much focus on the modern game, the stories that make it great are falling by the wayside.
Once those stories stop being told, they could be gone forever. For those of us who love the game and its history so much, we must keep those faint echos of baseball's past alive by retelling their stories. That is the mission of Diamond Echos.
Like many of you, I've had a lifelong love affair with baseball. In grade school, I did chores and a paper route to earn enough to buy the Sporting News, Baseball Digest and anything baseball. By Sunday night, I had memorized the top ten lists in batting averages, home runs, stolen bases, ERA, and wins.
In 1992, I took my love of baseball and the challenges of fantasy baseball to form a company called Fantasy Baseball Journal. That company produced the first report about player injuries – The Mash Report. I authored that report all the way to 2015. I also created a pre-internet report called Hot Sheet. The Hot Sheet provided fantasy baseball fans with breaking and critical baseball and injury news via fax several times a week.
I always wanted baseball fans to get together and that was the reason I created a baseball conference (original name was Symposium on Fantasy Baseball) for fantasy fans called First Pitch. Today, First Pitch - Arizona remains the premier event for fantasy fans.
Along the way, my work has been read in Fantasy Baseball Magazine, ESPN the Magazine, ESPN.com, Baseball Weekly, Baseball Injury Report, Baseball HQ and the Baseball Forecaster.
In 2021, I had the great honor of being inducted into the Fantasy Sports Writers Association’s Hall of Fame. That lifelong love and obsession with baseball, along with my years of being blessed to write about baseball, has brought me to today and Diamond
Echos. From the origins of baseball through the 1999 baseball season, we will explore and savor baseball's rich history.
In 2021, I had the great honor of being inducted into the Fantasy Sports Writers Association’s Hall of Fame. That lifelong love and obsession with baseball along with my years of being blessed to write about baseball has brought me to today and Diamond Echos. From the origins of the birth of baseball through the 1999 baseball season, we will explore and saver baseball history.
Rick Wilton was inducted into the Fantasy Sports Writers Association in 2021.