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As MLB The Show enters a sizzling summer,
4th Inning Program Overview
The 4th Inning Program includes three inner-circle Hall of Famers as Bosses. Two of them, at least, are going to be superb Diamond Dynasty cards -- and the other one is Hank Greenberg.
Yes, it's true: For maybe the first time ever in a three-person competition between Derek Jeter and two other players in the Baseball Hall of Fame, you're going to benefit from picking the Yankees stalwart over one of the other two. That's because Jeter's card, tied to his 1999 season and the All-Star nod he got, is a brilliant contact hitter (120/108 Contact against righties and lefties, respectively) with good pop (80/82 Power against righties and lefties), and Greenberg's, which represents his 1938 season, is more like a really good slugger (104/109 Power) who leaves a bit to be desired in regards to his contact abilities (94/90). Jeter also has -- as you would expect -- a towering 120 Batting Clutch, meaning he'll be coming through quite often with runners in scoring position. Greenberg's, by contrast, is just 95.
And then there's defense, where Jeter is somehow also better than the original Hammerin' Hank, with a strong arm and Fielding and Reaction stats in the low 70s. Greenberg being a first baseman means his defense matters a lot less, but his Fielding and Reaction are actually slightly lower than Jeter's, and Jeter is, um, legendarily not a great fielder, while Greenberg's defense is harder to assess without modern metrics.
But if Jeter being better than one of the two other Bosses is a surprise, Nolan Ryan being the star of a trio of Inning Bosses is as far from a surprise as possible. The version of the Ryan Express that steams in with this 4th Inning harkens back to his 1977 All-Star campaign, when he had 11 starts with double-digit strikeouts by the end of June, 14 by the All-Star Game, and came one K short of having 10 of those consecutively. Ryan would go on to have his third-most strikeouts in a single season, wilting a bit as the summer dragged on, but this card should be formidable, and its 112 Stamina, 101 H/9, 102 K/9, and 108 Pitching Clutch to go with both Outlier on his fastball and Break Outlier to keep the 12/6 curve and sinker sharp are the makings of the annually potent Ryan card in Diamond Dynasty. The drawback, as ever, is control: 55 BB/9 and 65 Control are fair for a player who walked a career-high 204 batters in '77, also achieving the dubious feat of walking five or more batters in his first 14 starts of that season.
So long as they're over the plate fairly often, though, the fireballs Ryan will hurl are going to be very, very difficult to hit.
In addition to the Bosses, there are three new Cornerstone Evolution players on the 4th Inning XP reward path: Eric Davis, Craig Kimbrel, and Marcus Semien. Players can unlock 85 OVR versions of each of those players at reward path rungs and then complete Cornerstone Evolution programs for each player to unlock 92 OVR versions of each. Of the three, Kimbrel is probably the most useful as a flamethrowing reliever with maxed-out Pitching Clutch, as the Davis is fractionally off from how terrifying he was at his titanic peak and the Semien is a late-career card that is good at many things but outstanding at nothing.
The XP reward path also features a 93 OVR Adam Dunn. It has maxed-out Power against righties and is probably just an ideal lefty bench bat, unless you're really into hitting .220 with a homer every three at-bats against lefties.
As has been the case all year, players can only unlock two of the three Bosses for free from the 4th Inning XP path -- but the good news this go-round is that the XP requirements have been reduced considerably for the full path, with 440,000 XP clearing out all of the guaranteed rewards and unlocking the random spin-the-wheel versions that has been elusive for many in MLB The Show 25.
May Spotlight Program Finishes With Skubal, Harper, Wood, Caminero
The other major content drop this Friday might feature some slightly more exciting -- and certainly more modern -- players for DD users to obtain, in the form of reiging AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, erstwhile Nationals slugger Bryce Harper, and rising Nationals rookie James Wood as its headliners. But the prohibitive cost of Harper's Retro Lightning card and the largely unintuitive and grind-y means of unlocking Skubal and Wood diminishes the wattage of the May Spotlight finish considerably, even if there are also some other cool aspects to it.
Harper is, as was the case with Retro Lightning Carlos Santana in April's Spotlight program, a tier above the rest of the cards in it: He's got 110/100 Contact, 107/93 Power, 112 Batting Clutch, and 10 Quirks that cover most situations in the game. The defense and Speed leave him as a merely average right fielder when not at the plate, a bit of a bummer for a card from his amazing 13-homer May in his age-22 NL MVP season in 2015 -- Harper was bad in the field in 2013 and 2014, but genuinely good in 2015, and giving him a bit more juice there while also probably removing an MVP Harper card from the pool of possibilities going forward would have been a nice move by Sony San Diego. Still, this is a great card at 94 OVR, and only its exorbitant price -- likely to stay over half a million Stubs for some time to come -- hurts its status as a top-of-the-metagame option.
Skubal is the Lightning player of the month, meaning he's "free" in the sense that unlocking him only requires completing each weekly May Spotlight drop program and tossing the five unsellable cards unlocked through that effort into the Lightning collection. But he's a little underwhelming, with no stat over 100 on a 94 OVR card that is supposed to be representing a fantastic month on the mound in which Skubal outdid his tidy 2.20 ERA -- lower than the one from his Cy-worthy effort in 2024 -- with a microscopic 1.44 Fielding Independent Pitching, suggesting he was unlucky to post an ERA that high. Coming off a two-hit, 13-strikeout shutout that was a modern masterpiece and a Maddux, this feels like a precursor to the truly dominant Skubal that could come at year's end.
Wood and Junior Caminero getting twin 93 OVR cards to honor their breakout months of May, in contrast, feels like giving great cards to great performers. Wood's has 103/113 Contact and 90/93 Power -- glance upward two paragraphs to Harper's stats in those categories -- and also maxed-out Clutch, which is a massive call for a 22-year-old still yet to play a full season's worth of MLB games. Caminero hasn't, either, but he's off a four-homer week and has multi-hit games in seven of his last 12 appearances after registering just one in the first 24 days of May, so his torrid streak is well-represented by a card with 100/115 Power, Batting Clutch at 110, and Contact in the 90s.
And Caminero, a primary third baseman, also has secondary eligibility at second and shortstop, making his bat much easier to slide into a lineup. The problem -- in case you are not sensing the theme today -- is price, as he's the more coveted of the two Spotlight Drop 5 pack players, outshining a 93 OVR Nathan Eovaldi that comes after the Rangers' ace had a 0.68 ERA in May and yet comes with just one triple-digit pitching star, and looks likely to carry a price near 90K-100K Stubs this weekend.
The cost of Harper and the pack players that unlock him are a net negative for the Spotlight program as currently structured. And the dwindling utility of the weekly players that aren't the headliners was set to be a similar negative, except for Drop 5 rescuing the program in that respect: As was true for the Drop 5 of April, good players dot the 100-Star reward path for Drop 5 of May, with Monthly Awards versions of Pirates closer Dennis Santana, White Sox hot corner-er Miguel Vargas, and rare Orioles bright spot Ryan O'Hearn all available for grinding to the upper tiers of the reward path, and Topps Now editions of Blue Jays second baseman Ernie Clement (a lefty-killer) and Royals starter Noah Cameron (a light-throwing lefty with all sorts of breaking balls in his arsenal) having better chances to fill specialized roles than many of the Topps Now players to date.
Being able to count on a super-sized Drop 5 each month that grants a little more reward at month's end doesn't quite count as a panacea for what ails the Spotlight program -- or the game as a whole -- in this year's Diamond Dynasty. But it does help.
