9th Inning, September Lightning Players Drop in Diamond Dynasty

9th Inning Program Overview

With baseball's postseason finally here and the MLB regular season done and dusted, the 9th Inning in Diamond Dynasty, arriving in game on Friday, has a tough task in straddling the beginning of the playoffs and the end of a regular season but not the arrival of its awards.

What San Diego Studio landed on is an interesting compromise, with three Inning Bosses -- but a fourth reward that should standardize their value.

Those bosses are a Finest version of Andrew McCutchen and Awards series representatives of Chris Sale (for his 2024 NL Cy Young) and Corey Seager (for his 2023 World Series MVP), and they're plenty good for what they are. Cutch's card is about as good as right-handed hitters get and a very good defensive outfielder, if not quite mind-blowing or must-have; Sale approximates what Randy Johnson would be on the mound as a lanky lefty with a swooping sidearm motion and a slider that breaks dramatically, but lacks the Big Unit's overpowering fastball and really might be most notable for his maxed-out Pitching Clutch; Seager, long one of Diamond Dynasty's best shortstops at the plate, gets maxed-out stats against righties and in Batting Clutch, and will be just fine against lefties, but has a generous set of defensive stats that make him far less of a liability than lesser versions of his cards often can be.

But, notably, none of those cards hail from teams in this 2025 postseason, and so there's ample reason for the baseball fans still grinding in DD to not want them all that badly -- so the fourth option in the 9th Inning Boss choice packs is a 25,000-Stub voucher that effectively makes opting out of the bosses entirely a possibility for the first time.

Is that a smarter choice than just picking and selling one of these cards? Almost certainly not, given that they will surely sell for more than 25,000 Stubs even at their floor. But it is a choice that is available, and an interesting one that allows players to target Stubs rather than cards.

The rest of the 9th Inning XP reward path is more of what we've come to expect all year. The 99 OVR player thrown in among the Bosses is a Finest version of Joc Pederson from his 2019 postseason with the Dodgers; there are three Cornerstone Evolution players -- Johnny Bench, Tony Gwynn, and Tom Seaver -- that arrive as 93 OVR cards and can be earned in 99 OVR versions from standard stats-and-XP-and-Moments missions; and the packs available along the way are mostly Deluxe Choice ones, with Full Moon 2.0 and Home Run Derby X ones showing up beyond the final Boss pack.

This won't be the last Inning in Diamond Dynasty for MLB The Show 25, with a 10th Inning explicitly advertised in the 9th Inning Boss collection (standard 50,000 XP on offer for collecting all of McCutchen, Sale, and Seager), and it runs through the entirety of October, expiring on Halloween.

Jorge Polanco, Ronald Acuña Jr. Strike as August Lightning Players

The Seattle Mariners finished the 2025 regular season about as hot as they've ever been, with Cal Raleigh's historic power surge getting them to home-field advantage in the AL Divisional round of the playoffs and making him a legitimate challenger to Aaron Judge for AL MVP honors.

So, of course, it's Jorge Polanco who earns Lightning honors as the de facto player of the month for September in MLB The Show, as the Mariners second baseman swipes the stormy card from Raleigh after a torrid month in which he led MLB in doubles but notably did not reach 60 homers or set the records for home runs by a catcher and switch-hitter.

Polanco is a switch-hitter, and routinely one of the best switch-hitting second basemen in Diamond Dynasty, so this is an appreciably great card: It has 113 or better in three of the four Contact/Power stats (103 Power against righties is the outlier) and 125 Batting Clutch to null the Contact fairly often. With no defensive stats above 75 except Arm Accuracy, it's also just a Silver-tier defender, and really shouldn't be used at its secondary position of third base. But anyone who's used a good Polanco card over the years probably has good things to say about his swing, and this is also still a free-with-elbow grease card, one that has an argument to be the best second baseman in DD and doesn't take too much work to unlock.

It's also entirely overshadowed by its Retro Lightning counterpart, a Ronald Acuña Jr. that is likely the best version of La Bestia that we'll get in MLB The Show 25. This is an Acuña from the scintillating close to his 40/70 and NL MVP campaign in 2023, when he had double-digit homers and steals while powering the Braves to the playoffs, and it's just a magnificent card in almost every regard, with a lowish 107 Contact against lefties (as a right-handed hitter) and just 86 Speed -- off from the maxed-out numbers some Acuñas have had in Diamond Dynasty -- as its significant flaws. ("Only" 114 Batting Clutch is also odd, but Acuña working as a leadoff hitter does make his actual clutch prowess a little hard to accurately measure in the way MLB The Show stats do.)

The eight September Spotlight pack players that must be collected to obtain Acuña will run players close to a quarter-million Stubs at minimum, though there are plenty of packs in the various Spotlight drops that could defray that cost. Drop 4's XP reward path also has a couple of July Spotlight packs, though none from August, if players want to work back to previous Lightning picks. And the actual players in Drop 4 include Jake Mangum -- a 99 speed/stealing trio outfielder for the Rays -- at the top of the XP reward path and a really good version of White Sox reliever Grant Taylor among the pack players.

AL, NL Wild Card Programs Dealt

Trailing the bulk of Friday's content were two twinned AL and NL Wild Card programs, wrapping up the first series of MLB's postseason this week, which released a couple of hours after Friday's customary 3 p.m. Eastern content drop.

Both programs feature XP reward paths that are chock-full of performers from the four Wild Card series won by the Cubs, Dodgers, Guardians, and Yankees in the last few days. Yankees standout Cam Schlittler tops the AL Wild Card XP reward path, while Dodgers hurler Blake Snell sits at the end of the NL Wild Card program's path. Players can earn the Stats necessary for progress on the paths via Moments and missions tied to the series, but the Moments aren't strictly necessary, as enough Stars are available in the missions alone to complete each path.

These players -- six on the AL side, five on the NL -- are all 99 OVR Diamonds, as one might expect for this moment in the game cycle, and are all unsellable cards that will be collected in a single collection for the MVPs of the AL and NL Championship Series and the World Series.

Other News and Notes

• This edition of the Weekend Classic competition brings one hell of a reward in the form of a new Milestone series Mickey Mantle that pays tribute to his 1956 Triple Crown season. It's an extraordinary card, maybe the best Mantle to have graced Diamond Dynasty -- 125s in everything Contact/Power save Power against lefties, 125 Batting Clutch, 90+ stats in every defensive category and 93 Speed -- and it will be vanishingly rare by dint of Weekend Classic's difficulty, with its price likely to be at or above 500,000 Stubs on the market. Good luck if you're going after the Commerce Comet -- you'll need it.
• The month-long Spooky program running in parallel to the rest of October's content in DD is hard to evaluate because it's a lot of reused assets and is half-revealed at the moment, but it does have four 99 OVR players -- Andre Dawson, Michael Young, John Franco, and Cliff Lee -- so far, and also has a Chase pack and some Spotlight packs on its reward path. Is that worth the annoyance of checking in daily to see what players and what tasks are necessary to make progress on a 100-Star path when each task rewards just two or three? Maybe not. But it is better than the month of Sammy Sosa Moments! An update to the Spooky program's missions is coming on Friday, October 10.
• We missed writing up the Postseason Past program last week thanks to your intrepid author coming down with COVID, but it's there, it has a 99 OVR Roy Halladay honoring his postseason no-hitter at the top of its reward path, and it's not much of a thrill.
• Last week's more exciting neglected content was the arrival of a fiery version of Mike Trout honoring his 400th home run, which was unlocked through a player program not unlike the ones for Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander earlier in the year. The difference was that this was a tremendous Trout, about as good as any Diamond Dynasty has ever seen, and that over 10,000 players already have him at Parallel IV -- and another 2,000+ at Parallel V -- is a great testament to how he mashes.
• The final roster update reflecting the regular season arrived this Friday, with Aaron Judge getting bumped to an unheard-of 96 OVR, Shohei Ohtani creeping up to 93 OVR, and Cal Raleigh and Mason Miller each moving to 92 OVR. Seven new Diamonds include Geraldo Perdomo, Nick Kurtz, Cristopher Sanchez, Trevor Rogers, and, making a four-point jump, Blake Snell.
• October 17 is called out in the in-game "coming soon" rundown with a simple X emoji. It should be extremely clear what that is hinting at.