MLB The Show 26: Baseball in Video Game Form

Blast From the Past

On February 28, 2006, San Diego Studios released the first ever MLB The Show game called MLB 06. Boston Red Sox legend David Ortiz graced the cover that year. MLB The Show was only a PlayStation exclusive game up until MLB The Show 21 when Xbox finally got involved. Fast forward to 2022 and the Nintendo Switch made its debut in the baseball community. 

For 20 years, MLB The Show has been played by millions, and I am going to share with you my MLB The Show journey and my opinions on the current game.

Experience

I started playing MLB The Show games in 2018, with New York Yankees superstar Aaron Judge on the cover for the first time. 

When I started playing, I was terrible; I couldn’t hit or pitch, and my online teams were nowhere near as good as everyone that I played against. I found the mode Diamond Dynasty, which compares to Ultimate Team in other sports games like Madden or Fifa or NHL. In Diamond Dynasty, you start with a team from scratch and you have to grind for hours to complete different programs or moments to get players and packs to improve your team. The more I play, the quicker and easier it gets to improve my team. 

Since MLB The Show 18, I have become a competitive The Show player, accomplishing things that I thought I would never do, like going 12-0 in a Battle Royale draft to get a crazy reward, or hitting World Series in Ranked seasons. Now, those accomplishments feel natural to me.

Diamond Dynasty

Diamond Dynasty is by far the most popular mode in every MLB The Show game. It is one of the few online modes in the game which makes it super popular. If players don’t want to play online, then they’ll go to the most popular offline mode which is Road To The Show. That mode is where players can create their own characters and send them through a high school and college season, going through the whole draft process, and then working their way through the minor league system to make it to the big leagues. 

Difficulty

There are six difficulty levels in this game, rookie, veteran, all- star, hall-of-fame, legend, and Greatest of All Time (GOAT). Rookie is the easiest while GOAT is the hardest. On rookie, the pitch speeds from the pitcher are slower and much easier to hit. On GOAT, pitch speeds are significantly faster and move way more, making it almost impossible to hit. 

I like to play on all-star difficulty, sometimes hall-of-fame too because those are the two most common modes when it comes to online play. GOAT was added in 2025, and was also removed in the same year due to players complaining about how ridiculously hard it was, so San Diego Studios (SDS for short) made the decision in June of 2025 to remove it from competitive game modes, but brought it back for 2026. 

Annoying Flaws

Like every video game, MLB the Show 26 has its flaws. One major flaw that occurs every year is the bad servers. I can’t even tell you how many times I have dealt with horrible connections during games that I can’t control or improve because most of the time it’s all my opponent’s doing. 

For 10 years, “freeze offs” would occur because games would desynchronize, but for the first few years those freeze offs wouldn’t occur for very long. In MLB The Show 21, freeze offs would last for hours and the only way to get out of one is by restarting the game entirely, but you would get the loss unless your opponent quits before you. I have seen players in freeze offs for nine hours because they don’t want to get the loss. 

Another flaw that I notice all the time is with pitching. I use pinpoint pitching which is considered the most accurate, but sometimes pitches will teleport out of the strike zone and that’s due to the bad connection. 

Another flaw with pinpoint specifically is I can have a perfect pitch input, and the ball will end up not going where I want it to go. For example, I will throw a fastball up and in trying to get it on the inside corner of the strike zone, I will do everything to get a perfect pitch input, and the ball ends up too far inside or too far in the strike zone for my opponent to crush for a home run. 

Another flaw that I see is in hitting with the amount of “perfect perfects” being outs. A perfect perfect is where you square up a ball, like a barrel in real life. Most of the time, a barrel is a hit or a home run. In MLB The Show 26, you can hit a ball with 110+ mph exit velocity, and it will be a ground out or a line out. That feeling is the worst feeling in the entire world.

Impressive Gameplay

It’s hard to really make any drastic changes to gameplay in sports games. I will say over the years that I have played this series, the gameplay has gotten better. Getting a new console  also helps the gameplay. I have a PlayStation 5, and that is considered Next Gen. My PlayStation 4 is considered current gen, and some games are starting to only release on the next gen consoles because there is a night and day difference in gameplay between current gen and next gen consoles. Some of the animations that SDS have added make zero sense to me, but every game has those ridiculous animations. Overall, the gameplay isn’t terrible. 

Real Life Training

Funny enough, MLB The Show is a good training tool. MLB The Show trains your eyes from seeing what’s a ball and what’s a strike, how different pitches move, the different pitching deliveries, and how hard pitchers throw. That training can be used in real life baseball, players can become more disciplined at the plate and get on base more.

Where to Purchase

If you want to get the game yourself, there’s a standard version which is $70, and there is a digital deluxe version at $100. The digital deluxe version comes with way more perks that make up for the extra $30, but if you don’t want all of those perks, get the standard version, it’s the same game. MLB The Show 26 is located in the Xbox, PlayStation, and the Nintendo Switch store or if you don’t want to buy it on your console and you want the disc and cover, it is also available at your local Gamestop. 

Final Thoughts

MLB The Show 26, headlined by Aaron Judge on the cover for the second time, is not a terrible game. It’s not the best game in the world, but it’s also not the worst of the series. Yes, there are frustrating animations and connection issues, but overall it is a game that I enjoy playing and worth the $70 that I spend every year on. Overall, I give MLB The Show 26, a 3 out of 5 Cyclones.