San Diego Studios Shares Plans for MLB The Show 26

San Diego Studio Looks to MLB The Show 26

The end of the 2025 MLB season and its thrilling Postseason comes with the Los Angeles Dodgers on top of the baseball world and Sony San Diego Studio turning most of its efforts to MLB The Show 26 rather than MLB The Show 25. As the former title enters new phases of its development, the studio posted one of the most important news updates of the development cycle on its website on Thursday, titling it "Goal Setting: MLB The Show 26."

The post has five primary subheadings pointing to its plans for MLB The Show 26 in overall gameplay, Diamond Dynasty, Road To The Show, Franchise, and an expansion of its cinematic Storylines mode into more stories of the Negro Leagues.

Let's discuss what those could all mean.

Reasoned Speculation on MLB The Show 26

Of those five tentpoles -- I guess this is a pentagonal tent? -- the most important is obviously gameplay, which will touch all four other aspects mentioned and all the rest of those within MLB The Show 26. And SDS's "delivering the most authentic on-field baseball experience" through "advanced logic and new data metrics… redefining ratings, pitch effects, and bat ball physics" probably makes clear that a significant revamp of its pitcher-batter battles is going to be one of the back-of-the-box changes for its next iteration of The Show.

While that could mean a lot of things, what would seem most likely is a re-evaluation of what qualifies as quality contact for hitters and perhaps a reimagining of what pitches do. The relationships of ratings and player skill to results on batted bats is a perennial point of discussion -- and/or pain -- for the MLB The Show player base, and while the usual discussion about lower-rated players failing to homer on Perfect-Perfect swings happened early in the MLB The Show 25 game cycle, most discussions about hitting have focused on the shrinking of the Plate Coverage Indicator (PCI) on locations outside the displayed strike zone. That feature of 25's gameplay has produced a metagame focused on breaking pitches that end up at or just outside the zone and switch hitters who can better handle pitches breaking away from right- and left-handed pitchers by more or less nullifying them.

To an extent, that metagame has been a iF feature of virtually every baseball video game that has ever been released, and is obviously reflective of a real-life aspect of baseball: It's tough to hit pitches low and away! But the sense that players can abuse a mechanic that rewards making pitches difficult to hit -- even with the existence of ambush hitting that should help batters anticipate and respond to such a tactic -- has rankled some players who have kept playing The Show into the late stages of 25's prominence, and how or if SDS responds to that in 26 will be interesting to see. Perhaps PCI shrinkage will be excised; perhaps it will be paired with a more expansive PCI that allows players to swing at a larger area at the plate; perhaps the changes will render another feature the bugbear in the dog days of summer 2026.

Regardless, those gameplay changes will probably mean most to the diehards who play Diamond Dynasty daily, and the return of Now & Later packs -- which functioned in MLB The Show 24 to provide progress that could carry over to the outset of MLB The Show 25 in DD -- is surely a welcome return for those players. But it's the quiet tease of more in that vein -- and the pointed use of "fantasy" in a promise of more content in either 25 or 26 -- that caught my eye.

One of the things that Diamond Dynasty has lacked for the decade or so that I have played various iterations of it is any real connection to fantasy sports, which have their roots in fantasy baseball. While the Live series does function to some degree as a reflection of real-life performance, it is also the battleship of that practice, venerable but also deliberate. A Fantasy series of cards that would improve over the season as players reach statistical milestones would shake up the early-game collecting side of DD substantially, and has the potential to be wildly successful -- not unlike the Fantasy Hockey program within Hockey Ultimate Team in the EA Sports-published NHL series. (That EA Sports is widely perceived to have botched this year's program does suggest some risk to go with the reward here.)

Of course, I could also be overreacting to the use of a single word in a section of a blog post. That's harder to do with the final three segments.

In the case of Road To The Show, the single-player experience I have seldom played in recent years and mostly observe in others' content, it's hard to think "a suite of new colleges and a focus on the mid-to-late career" is a bad thing in any way. Deepening the roster of schools that players can begin their RTTS journeys at simply allows for a broader range of hooks for players getting into the mode, and a revamp of the later stages of a player's career -- which I have observed to be fairly stale repetition of demigods dominating their leagues -- can only bring variety that will either add diversity of outcomes or simply be ignored by players who grind to future Hall of Famer status.

For Franchise, "continue evolving the front office experience by building deeper, more immersive, and challenging systems shaped by community feedback" could mean so many things that there's no way to scry it effectively. Probably, it doesn't mean that yet another pass at trade logic will be a touted feature, but who knows?

And finally, the extension of Storylines means that one of the best but least-hyped features in all of sports video gaming will continue, and with yet more focus on the stars of the Negro Leagues whose stories have gone untold for too long.

Now & Later Packs and Program: First Notes

At the end of the blog post, SDS outlines a few first locations for Now and Later packs to be earned now and in MLB The Show 25 for redemption in MLB The Show 26.

• Those who subscribe to the Scouting Report email newsletter by Friday, November 14 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Team will earn five Now & Later packs.
• Now & Later Packs appear in the 11th Inning XP Path, which releases on Friday, November 21.
• In early 2026, Now & Later packs will be available in a dedicated Now & Later program.