7th Inning Brings Steve Carlton to Diamond Dynasty, Weekend Classic Features Randy Johnson

7th Inning Program Overview

The newest overarching program in Diamond Dynasty brings three 99 OVR cards: Phillies ace Steve Carlton, ertswhile Padres star Chase Headley, and Red Sox stalwart David Ortiz. Surely Headley's brief brilliance measures up against Carlton winning the pitching Triple Crown and Ortiz's illustrious career.

Well, no.

Carlton's card is fantastic, a proper tribute to his phenomenal 1972, in which he went 27-10 with a 1.97 ERA and 310 strikeouts for a Phillies team that mustered just 22 wins the guy so good he just got called "Lefty" didn't get credit for. His card would be the easy best lefty in Diamond Dynasty if not for a potentially better one also released today, with maxed-out Stamina, nothing worse than a 90 elsewhere, and Break Outlier to accentuate his amazing slider, which slices across the plate at 87 MPH. That 1972 campaign is on the very short list of the best pitching seasons in the history of baseball, and Carlton -- new to DD this season -- is getting what could potentially be his best DD card ever even after a few more years in the game. It's well-deserved, and should be the first pick from this Boss pack.

The Ortiz hails from the Hall of Fame series and comes in as probably the preeminent left-handed hitter in all of DD at the moment. 121/125 Contact/Power against right-handers will obviously play about as well as is possible from that side of the dish, but his triple-digit stats against lefties make him slightly more than just an overqualified pinch hitter. The defense and speed are obviously forgettable at best, but the card does have first base as a primary position rather than designated hitter, allowing him to be deployed in the field more as a ticking time bomb than anything.

Headley is, uh, a Padres third baseman, clearly necessary to include in the Inning Boss lineage because of his lone superb season in 2012, in which he had 31 homers and 115 RBI -- career bests by 17 and 51, respectively -- and won both a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger for a Padres team that finished 76-86 and in fourth in the NL West. The card itself is fine, even good, with triple digits in all of the Contact/Power/Clutch attributes for a hitter, great defense, and respectable speed and baserunning numbers. But also: The Padres currently have Manny Machado, right now, in the present day, and Machado has had multiple seasons as good or better than Headley's best, and is well on his way to another in that realm for a team that could do damage in this postseason. Some Padres pandering is to be expected from a San Diego-based development team that has more than a few Friars fans on staff, sure, and Headley being a new "legend" for MLB The Show 25 practically guaranteed him a great card at some juncture, but this just doesn't seem like the proper program for that necessary tribute.

The three Cornerstone Evolution players in the 7th Inning are Wade Boggs, Willie Stargell, and Brandon Webb, and are all serviceable for what they are: Boggs has 125/125 Contact, a fine set of quirks, and might occasionally hit a homer with Power in the 80s; Stargell is a power hitter with less impressive Contact numbers; and Webb is a soft-tosser with some variety in his off-speed offerings.

The 7th Inning exclusive XP reward path player is a 99 OVR Rich "Goose" Gossage with 122 or better in all of H/9, K/9, and Pitching Clutch and 99 Velocity/Break that slots in as perhaps the best reliever in DD. That he's an afterthought is maybe an error, but Gossage has that status in reality, sadly, so this isn't far from par for the course.

The 7th Inning XP reward path also has the usual smattering of packs, Stubs, and forgettable cosmetics as rewards, and the newly familiar set of simple stat missions and player exchanges for XP within it, but is also a short-run, three-week affair that maxes out its programmed rewards at just 340,000 XP before getting to the random rewards. The two Bosses available on the XP reward path are at 155,000 and 265,000 XP.

Weekend Classic Returns with Randy Johnson, Jackie Robinson as Rewards

The latest edition of Diamond Dynasty's high-level competitive mode, Weekend Classic, comes with two commensurate rewards in the form of a Awards series Randy Johnson and Jackie Robinson cards that stand head and shoulders above the rewards that have come before.

The Randy is, well, Randy: His 1995 Cy Young season with the Mariners is what's being honored and used as the foundation for his card, and so it's going to bring a four-seamer with Outlier and a slider and splitter than benefit from Break Outlier to bear on the mound. His control (84 BB/9, 81 Control) is a little less than Carlton's, which is actually a little unfair -- the Big Unit walked just 65 batters in '95, posting his best K/BB ratio before moving to the no-DH National League with the Diamondbacks and getting to overwhelm hapless pitchers every nine batters -- but it's perhaps a necessary nerf to Johnson in DD, as his high arm angle on an essentially sidearm release has made him notoriously tough to hit in The Show since time immemorial. The nice thing about this Randy is that anyone in Weekend Classic this week will probably not be facing it unless matched up against a whale who ponied up the six-digit Stubs cost to have him atop the rotation; the truly scary thing about it is that there's still room for a better one from his dominant era in the desert.

But if Randy is brilliant but as anticipated, the Jackie is an unexpectedly great second baseman, with what San Diego Studio's live stream touted as the highest Power against righties that any Jackie Robinson card has ever had in Diamond Dynasty. If that stat still feels low relative to, y'know, modern standards for power at just a 93, that's fair -- but Jackie also hit just 16 homers in his 1949 NL MVP season, which is what's being honored here, and his .528 slugging that year was his career-best in MLB, though not his best as a major leaguer (he had a .600 slugging in his brief tenure with the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945.) That said, just 11 MLB players are currently slugging over .528 in 2025, and the mere two who are above .500 but below 20 homers -- Dodgers catcher Will Smith and Royals superstar Bobby Witt Jr. -- both have significantly lower Power numbers on their Live series cards. So take this Jackie, who is great at everything but socking dingers, for what he is, but also maybe choose Randy from the Weekend Classic pack if you're lucky enough to earn it, because you could sell that card and buy Jackie's two or three times over if necessary.

This Weekend Classic will run from Friday until Tuesday, replacing Ranked as the primary online head-to-head mode in Diamond Dynasty.

Other News and Notes

• The latest Chase pack card had some high bars to clear to see eye-to-eye with Steve Carlton and Randy Johnson as a release on this Friday -- so, shockingly, Biz Mackey actually more or less does. The Negro Leagues catcher hopscotched from team to team in the 1920s and '30s, acquiring a reputation for tremendous defense -- here represented by a surely unprecedented full slate of 99s in his defensive stats -- and hitting well enough to ultimately make the Hall of Fame despite only once hitting double-digit homers. But this version of Mackey also has secondary positional eligibility everywhere but pitcher and has 77 Speed to make him a viable outfield option and gets 125/120 Contact and 125 Batting Clutch. There's an argument that he's the best catcher outside of his power -- which compares favorably to Jackie's, mind! -- in Diamond Dynasty history. It's a shame he'll be prohibitively expensive because of the Chase pack tax, but Mackey might just be a must-try player. (And no, despite their similar names, rapper Biz Markie doesn't take his name from Mackey, instead deriving it from an early rapper named Busy Bee Starski and his neighborhood nickname of Markie, a play on his given first name of Marcel.)
• August Spotlight Drop 3 is also a thing that happened on this Friday. A 99 OVR Edward Cabrera being the third-best pitcher released today -- and free through the drop's reward path! -- is an amusing footnote for anyone terrorized by his legendary Future Stars card from years past, but the rest of the drop is also studded with interesting names: Ben Rice, Dylan Beavers, Zach Neto, Francisco Alvarez. With two more weeks until Drop 5 and August's Lightning player, there's plenty of time to catch up.
• Unsurprisingly, there's double XP -- of both the 7th Inning reward path and Parallel varieties -- to tie in to the 7th Inning's release. It runs through the entirety of Weekend Classic, or until Tuesday, August 26.