I’ve been playing the MLB The Show series for nearly 20 years at this point–since they rebranded their MLB series to MLB The Show on the PS2. It’s been impressive to watch the series evolve into a top-tier licensed sports game almost every year—no small feat for the genre. Its innovations have consistently outpaced competitors, like the PS4-era feature that let you carry franchise or career saves forward year to year. That system seems to have been replaced with cross-platform save support, allowing you to continue progress across different platforms instead. The great thing MLB The Show does for Diamond Dynasty, it’s Ultimate Team mode, is that progress is cross-platform by default so that you can open packs, sell cards, and play with your squads on any platform that nobody else does. I know why EA or 2K would not allow that, but it’s ridiculous that MLB The Show is the only game in the genre that is nice to the player for its Ultimate Team mode.
Another major innovation in MLB The Show 26 is the integration of women into Franchise and Road to the Show—something no other sports game currently offers. You can now populate minor league rosters with female players, marking a significant step forward. It’s a welcome evolution from the past two years, where Road to the Show let you create a female player alongside Mia Lewis, with the two of you as the only women to break into the MLB. This year builds on that foundation: you create a new female player, while Mia returns as a retired legend turned agent, helping pave the way for others. It’s a smart nod to the past while setting up a more inclusive future.
It’s also great because the separate locker room your player had in the previous games now has some company from the other women on your team. You can also pay your respects to whatever women you’ve made for previous games, though they only get mentioned in the very few times that I’ve seen it mentioned so far. It would’ve been nice if I could pull in one of my previous players through the cloud save system and have her show up in their physical form, but I get that it’s probably not as easy as I’d like it to be.
Let’s move on to what’s new this year, with Road to the Show getting some of the biggest updates. I’ve already mentioned the expanded inclusion of women, but the College World Series has also been upgraded, now featuring 19 teams to support a more robust 16-team tournament—an improvement over last year’s version. You can also meet with an adviser at the start to set your preferred college and pro teams, helping justify their interest in you.
Progression feels more defined this time around, with clear goals spanning your high school, college, and pro career. These objectives encourage stronger performance in exchange for rewards like upgrade tokens, similar to the monthly manager meetings but now more structured and visible. You can also text your agent or managers occasionally, whether to raise concerns or just check in. Notably, the experience feels more balanced this year—my Peggy Hill-inspired pitcher is no longer nearly perfect out of the gate, instead facing real struggles against stronger hitters. The power fantasy was fun, but this more grounded progression feels more authentic to how players develop.
Diamond Dynasty has the biggest visible changes with the devs overhauling the frontend menu for this year for the first time in a while. It’s more of a visual change than really improving the means of navigating around the menus, as the only thing I’d say that has really improved is the way that cards are collected for the collections they offer. Gone are the dense and nested menus of card collections the devs hope you’ll play enough to complete, which are replaced by a new look of menus that are a bit easier to parse with an easy way to submit a bunch of games to these collections.
The Live Series cards are those featuring the players actually playing this season that were a pain to deal with in previous years, but now it is set-up almost like a tournament style bracket that can let you submit all of the available cards you have for each division rather than drill down into each team’s set of cards. All of the other categories don’t get that kind of fancy-looking design, but you can also get a similar kind of mass submission of eligible cards for each of them. It also seems like some of the specialty series like Veterans, Rookies, etc. only require collecting a smaller portion of them to finish the set. Other sets still have the tiered set of rewards as you work your way to getting the full set, but that is a nice improvement for some of these sets that you’ve worked on for many years. The game does show how much it would cost to brute-force complete collections by buying the remaining cards, likely based on the lowest listed prices rather than the highest buy offers—which can lead to overspending. That’s why it’s better to take the time to place your own market offers, as you’ll save a significant amount of stubs.
The big issue I have with this new set-up is that if you have duplicate cards, you can no longer sell them from the collection listings anymore. You have to dig through nested inventory menus to find where a card is stored, and if you don’t remember the right spot, you end up wasting far more time than you should just trying to sell duplicates for extra cash. I’d love for DD to have the same options as the mobile app that lets you specifically sort out dupes to make this process very easy, but then why would I need the app at that point? The longer card collection lists scroll across multiple pages in a clunky way. It feels like infinite scrolling, but pauses to load each new page, which drags out the process. I’d much prefer simple controls to switch pages instead of excessive scrolling.
Other than those things, Diamond Dynasty is basically the same as it has been for a while. There are no new modes that I’ve seen so far, and those that are here work exactly the same. The battle pass equivalent here that are called innings are still free, though they also expire after a month or so and I’d love to see an end to that practice to match how other live service games are going. I know that the specific cards given out by these passes end up in card packs that are sold after the pass is over, but give us some extra time to work through them if we’re not playing the mode constantly while removing the aspect of each pass where it’ll keep giving you random packs after you’ve finished the main tiers early. I really have enjoyed Diamond Dynasty more since last year’s game as I play it more and more to keep collecting more cards while never touching any of the multiplayer modes since I’ve stopped caring to deal with the weird things people do for any advantage they can get.
Franchise mode gets the short straw in new features with the only thing I noticed being the new way they handle free agency in the off-season, which is more akin to an auction system from what I’ve seen. Once you get to the off-season, you’ll get prompted every seven days or so to check out the free agent section to fill out the top 3 free agents you’d like to sign. Depending on their spot on your list, their interest increases a small amount per week until they hit at least 50% interest in your team to let you make an offer. After that, you wait until they make a decision about your offer or to take another team’s offer, which is presented like some big event as that player trashes your offer or announces that they’re taking their talents to your team like it’s The Decision or they’re posting on social media. Being a Cleveland Guardians fan, I tried to sign the incredibly stupid but great pitcher Tarik Skubal to the max deal I could that was slightly higher than what he wanted and he laughed at my attempts to sign him. The joke was on him when he went to Toronto and had a subpar season while his team got nowhere close to a World Series title.
Let’s finish up with the remaining new things I saw around the game. The Negro Leagues Storylines mode is back for a new group of amazing players whose cards you can collect by finishing their stories that is always a great part of these games. My favorite new options and settings include some great accessibility options like PitchCom that can verbalize the suggested pitch location along with the visual aid to add more ways to help those that play to get their pitching mojo going. There’s a new fielding difficulty option for those that don’t want a complicated experience but don’t want it automated for them. The new Fixed Zone hitting interface is my favorite way to bat now as you get a version of the old Zone Hitting cursor mode that does not recenter itself, so you can set it where you’d like to hit the pitch if it is close and I’ve hit more homeruns in Diamond Dynasty this year than ever before. There’s also a great new option to turn on Depth of Field when batting so pesky details and movement in the background won’t distract you, which may also be helping me mash homers better than usual. The last thing I’ll mention is that the new ABS (Automated Balls & Strikes) system that MLB is using this year is in the game and if you use the ump calls that are variable, this is a fun way to tell those bad umps to get screwed when they mess up a call. It only works in Road to the Show and Franchise since the Diamond Dynasty mode has default settings for how pitches are called.
The visuals look just like they’ve been all generation at this point, which I assume is more because this series is not getting the huge budgets that NBA 2K and Madden get to make sure every player looks as realistic as it can get. It’s kind of where things are at unless they start doing gangbusters numbers, so I’ve just moved on from expecting an overhaul of the visuals. It probably doesn’t help that the Switch is part of the lineup of platforms that get MLB The Show 26, so maybe moving up to Switch 2 in the future would allow for some improvement. I’m not holding out hope.
The soundtrack is full of Spanish language music including Bad Bunny, and it’s cool to see them appealing to Central and South American audiences, as they become an even bigger part of the sport in general. The commentary is fine and nothing new, so I don’t always play with the audio on in my set-up because it’s not that big of a draw. Diamond Dynasty offers a new Robert Flores commentary option for games played in that mode that is okay at best and just dumb at worst because it feels like a bunch of random lines with no connecting chatter. He just talks about diamond cards and yells things that I assume are streamer lines that just doesn’t do anything for me, but it feels so disconnected from what’s going on in the games I’m playing.
With Opening Day here for the MLB, I once again have to deal with the Cleveland Guardians being disrespected by the media at large because the team’s owner is a poor billionaire that doesn’t let us have any big extensions outside of Jose Ramirez. At least we have some promising young guys to enjoy playing with in the game while I await seeing how they do in real games, so that’s the great part of MLB The Show 26. Road to the Show continues to put every other major league sports game’s career mode to shame as they do everything I want in that mode. Franchise is a fine way to spend some time, though the thought of playing a full season fills me with dread for how much time that’ll take even with the options they offer for skipping to the more exciting moments. Diamond Dynasty still offers a good card collection experience that actually keeps my attention far longer than any Ultimate Team mode in EA’s football games or NBA 2K’s aggressively monetized sandbox can ever hope to get from me. MLB The Show 26 is just a great game of baseball that is the wokest sports game around that I’ll keep playing for far too long until it gets in the way of my other duties here at SmashPad. Death to the Dodgers and the Yankees.
I’ve been playing the MLB The Show series for nearly 20 years at this point–since they rebranded their MLB series to MLB The Show on the PS2. It’s been impressive to watch the series evolve into a top-tier licensed sports…
I’ve been playing the MLB The Show series for nearly 20 years at this point–since they rebranded their MLB series to MLB The Show on the PS2. It’s been impressive to watch the series evolve into a top-tier licensed sports game almost every year—no small feat for the genre. Its innovations have consistently outpaced competitors, like the PS4-era feature that let you carry franchise or career saves forward year to year. That system seems to have been replaced with cross-platform save support, allowing you to continue progress across different platforms instead. The great thing MLB The Show does for Diamond Dynasty, it’s Ultimate Team mode, is that progress is cross-platform by default so that you can open packs, sell cards, and play with your squads on any platform that nobody else does. I know why EA or 2K would not allow that, but it’s ridiculous that MLB The Show is the only game in the genre that is nice to the player for its Ultimate Team mode.
Another major innovation in MLB The Show 26 is the integration of women into Franchise and Road to the Show—something no other sports game currently offers. You can now populate minor league rosters with female players, marking a significant step forward. It’s a welcome evolution from the past two years, where Road to the Show let you create a female player alongside Mia Lewis, with the two of you as the only women to break into the MLB. This year builds on that foundation: you create a new female player, while Mia returns as a retired legend turned agent, helping pave the way for others. It’s a smart nod to the past while setting up a more inclusive future.
It’s also great because the separate locker room your player had in the previous games now has some company from the other women on your team. You can also pay your respects to whatever women you’ve made for previous games, though they only get mentioned in the very few times that I’ve seen it mentioned so far. It would’ve been nice if I could pull in one of my previous players through the cloud save system and have her show up in their physical form, but I get that it’s probably not as easy as I’d like it to be.
Let’s move on to what’s new this year, with Road to the Show getting some of the biggest updates. I’ve already mentioned the expanded inclusion of women, but the College World Series has also been upgraded, now featuring 19 teams to support a more robust 16-team tournament—an improvement over last year’s version. You can also meet with an adviser at the start to set your preferred college and pro teams, helping justify their interest in you.
Progression feels more defined this time around, with clear goals spanning your high school, college, and pro career. These objectives encourage stronger performance in exchange for rewards like upgrade tokens, similar to the monthly manager meetings but now more structured and visible. You can also text your agent or managers occasionally, whether to raise concerns or just check in. Notably, the experience feels more balanced this year—my Peggy Hill-inspired pitcher is no longer nearly perfect out of the gate, instead facing real struggles against stronger hitters. The power fantasy was fun, but this more grounded progression feels more authentic to how players develop.
Diamond Dynasty has the biggest visible changes with the devs overhauling the frontend menu for this year for the first time in a while. It’s more of a visual change than really improving the means of navigating around the menus, as the only thing I’d say that has really improved is the way that cards are collected for the collections they offer. Gone are the dense and nested menus of card collections the devs hope you’ll play enough to complete, which are replaced by a new look of menus that are a bit easier to parse with an easy way to submit a bunch of games to these collections.
The Live Series cards are those featuring the players actually playing this season that were a pain to deal with in previous years, but now it is set-up almost like a tournament style bracket that can let you submit all of the available cards you have for each division rather than drill down into each team’s set of cards. All of the other categories don’t get that kind of fancy-looking design, but you can also get a similar kind of mass submission of eligible cards for each of them. It also seems like some of the specialty series like Veterans, Rookies, etc. only require collecting a smaller portion of them to finish the set. Other sets still have the tiered set of rewards as you work your way to getting the full set, but that is a nice improvement for some of these sets that you’ve worked on for many years. The game does show how much it would cost to brute-force complete collections by buying the remaining cards, likely based on the lowest listed prices rather than the highest buy offers—which can lead to overspending. That’s why it’s better to take the time to place your own market offers, as you’ll save a significant amount of stubs.
The big issue I have with this new set-up is that if you have duplicate cards, you can no longer sell them from the collection listings anymore. You have to dig through nested inventory menus to find where a card is stored, and if you don’t remember the right spot, you end up wasting far more time than you should just trying to sell duplicates for extra cash. I’d love for DD to have the same options as the mobile app that lets you specifically sort out dupes to make this process very easy, but then why would I need the app at that point? The longer card collection lists scroll across multiple pages in a clunky way. It feels like infinite scrolling, but pauses to load each new page, which drags out the process. I’d much prefer simple controls to switch pages instead of excessive scrolling.
Other than those things, Diamond Dynasty is basically the same as it has been for a while. There are no new modes that I’ve seen so far, and those that are here work exactly the same. The battle pass equivalent here that are called innings are still free, though they also expire after a month or so and I’d love to see an end to that practice to match how other live service games are going. I know that the specific cards given out by these passes end up in card packs that are sold after the pass is over, but give us some extra time to work through them if we’re not playing the mode constantly while removing the aspect of each pass where it’ll keep giving you random packs after you’ve finished the main tiers early. I really have enjoyed Diamond Dynasty more since last year’s game as I play it more and more to keep collecting more cards while never touching any of the multiplayer modes since I’ve stopped caring to deal with the weird things people do for any advantage they can get.
Franchise mode gets the short straw in new features with the only thing I noticed being the new way they handle free agency in the off-season, which is more akin to an auction system from what I’ve seen. Once you get to the off-season, you’ll get prompted every seven days or so to check out the free agent section to fill out the top 3 free agents you’d like to sign. Depending on their spot on your list, their interest increases a small amount per week until they hit at least 50% interest in your team to let you make an offer. After that, you wait until they make a decision about your offer or to take another team’s offer, which is presented like some big event as that player trashes your offer or announces that they’re taking their talents to your team like it’s The Decision or they’re posting on social media. Being a Cleveland Guardians fan, I tried to sign the incredibly stupid but great pitcher Tarik Skubal to the max deal I could that was slightly higher than what he wanted and he laughed at my attempts to sign him. The joke was on him when he went to Toronto and had a subpar season while his team got nowhere close to a World Series title.
Let’s finish up with the remaining new things I saw around the game. The Negro Leagues Storylines mode is back for a new group of amazing players whose cards you can collect by finishing their stories that is always a great part of these games. My favorite new options and settings include some great accessibility options like PitchCom that can verbalize the suggested pitch location along with the visual aid to add more ways to help those that play to get their pitching mojo going. There’s a new fielding difficulty option for those that don’t want a complicated experience but don’t want it automated for them. The new Fixed Zone hitting interface is my favorite way to bat now as you get a version of the old Zone Hitting cursor mode that does not recenter itself, so you can set it where you’d like to hit the pitch if it is close and I’ve hit more homeruns in Diamond Dynasty this year than ever before. There’s also a great new option to turn on Depth of Field when batting so pesky details and movement in the background won’t distract you, which may also be helping me mash homers better than usual. The last thing I’ll mention is that the new ABS (Automated Balls & Strikes) system that MLB is using this year is in the game and if you use the ump calls that are variable, this is a fun way to tell those bad umps to get screwed when they mess up a call. It only works in Road to the Show and Franchise since the Diamond Dynasty mode has default settings for how pitches are called.
The visuals look just like they’ve been all generation at this point, which I assume is more because this series is not getting the huge budgets that NBA 2K and Madden get to make sure every player looks as realistic as it can get. It’s kind of where things are at unless they start doing gangbusters numbers, so I’ve just moved on from expecting an overhaul of the visuals. It probably doesn’t help that the Switch is part of the lineup of platforms that get MLB The Show 26, so maybe moving up to Switch 2 in the future would allow for some improvement. I’m not holding out hope.
The soundtrack is full of Spanish language music including Bad Bunny, and it’s cool to see them appealing to Central and South American audiences, as they become an even bigger part of the sport in general. The commentary is fine and nothing new, so I don’t always play with the audio on in my set-up because it’s not that big of a draw. Diamond Dynasty offers a new Robert Flores commentary option for games played in that mode that is okay at best and just dumb at worst because it feels like a bunch of random lines with no connecting chatter. He just talks about diamond cards and yells things that I assume are streamer lines that just doesn’t do anything for me, but it feels so disconnected from what’s going on in the games I’m playing.
With Opening Day here for the MLB, I once again have to deal with the Cleveland Guardians being disrespected by the media at large because the team’s owner is a poor billionaire that doesn’t let us have any big extensions outside of Jose Ramirez. At least we have some promising young guys to enjoy playing with in the game while I await seeing how they do in real games, so that’s the great part of MLB The Show 26. Road to the Show continues to put every other major league sports game’s career mode to shame as they do everything I want in that mode. Franchise is a fine way to spend some time, though the thought of playing a full season fills me with dread for how much time that’ll take even with the options they offer for skipping to the more exciting moments. Diamond Dynasty still offers a good card collection experience that actually keeps my attention far longer than any Ultimate Team mode in EA’s football games or NBA 2K’s aggressively monetized sandbox can ever hope to get from me. MLB The Show 26 is just a great game of baseball that is the wokest sports game around that I’ll keep playing for far too long until it gets in the way of my other duties here at SmashPad. Death to the Dodgers and the Yankees.
by Chris Selogy
