Scott Rolen Arrives as New Legend in Diamond Dynasty — Twice

Scott Rolen Debuts as Two Different Collection Rewards

Defying some expectations and hopes, the longtime Phillies and Cardinals third baseman and 2022 Baseball Hall of Fame inductee is, in fact, the new Legend just added to Diamond Dynasty this Friday, and his debut comes in the form of a 99 OVR Awards Series card that is the new Legends and Flashbacks Collection reward and a 87 OVR card that is part of a new Rolen and the Reds Program.

The 99 OVR Rolen, given the gorgeous Gold Glove card art and tied to his days with the Phillies, is the clear draw here, and more than an adequate Collection reward. With 100+ Contact against both righties and lefties and 109 Batting Clutch, he will have no trouble getting on the basepaths, and with 115 Power against lefties as a right-handed hitter, he's part of just a quintet of such players currently in Diamond Dynasty, the rest of whom are catchers or left fielders. The defense is also predictably brilliant, with the only stat under 90 being an 85 Arm Strength that will be just fine, especially considering that an 86 OVR Brooks Robinson checks in at 87 Arm Strength. Install this Rolen at third and you won't have to worry about the hot corner for months.

Of course, obtaining Rolen comes at great cost. Players will first have to acquire a total of 18 vouchers and players from various programs' collections, and those players include, for example, the Anthony Santander from the New Threads collection and the Jacob deGrom from the Egg Hunt collection, each of which individually require collecting 28 players from those programs. Rolen's effective cost isn't likely to drop from multiple millions of Stubs to a mere million-plus Stubs, much less six digits, for months to come.

The surprise, though, is a little brother version of Rolen arriving in tandem with the top-tier one, and that card being ... distinctly underwhelming? It's a good-but-not-great defender, with numbers right around 80, but lacks a lot of the pop that the better Rolen has, and really isn't a draw at the position, where it lags behind plenty of free options. Getting a Reds version of Rolen in DD is nice for Reds fans who might have fond memories of him making a pair of All-Star appearances in the last three years of his career, but this was a diminished version of the future Hall of Famer, and while he did finish 14th in MVP voting in 2010, the year this card is tagged to, one imagines that Reds fans might be slightly more excited about the actual 2010 NL MVP, given that it was Joey Votto.

It is also a bit odd that the Rolen card is not the reward for fully completing the Rolen and the Reds program; that capstone is actually a 90 OVR Johnny Cueto, whose 2010 season (12-7, 3.64 ERA) is, uh, not deserving of a 90 OVR card in the first place. The 79 OVR Jim Edmonds that rounds out the trio of new players from the program, which is a brief Moments and Parallel XP affair that should take an evening, if that, is also no one's idea of an interesting card.

But the presence of Phillies and Reds versions of Rolen and the enormous gap between their ratings means that a Cardinals version that might be an even better defender and should reflect his monster 2004 season at the plate will be on the way. And Rolen's presence in DD does bring another icon and Hall of Famer of the 2000s to the player pool, even if his is not as big a name as some (Barry Bonds, Ichiro) that were bandied about in recent days but would surely be integrated throughout the marketing of the game to induce preorders.

Rebuild Year Mini Seasons

With Diamond Quest debuting in MLB The Show 25 and a veritable torrent of Conquest maps coming out alongside it, it has been easy to forget Mini Seasons as a single-player mode within Diamond Dynasty. That changes this Friday, with the first new Mini Seasons campaign since launch, the so-called Rebuild Year, arriving in DD.

As you might expect from its title, Rebuild Year presents an intriguing lower-OVR challenge: Rosters are limited to players at 81 OVR or lower and a handful of Diamond-level players exclusive to packs earned through completing goals over the course of your 28-game season. And those players are genuinely interesting, with a Contributor series Mark Canha and a 2nd Half Heroes series Mitch Garver getting fan favorites fading in real life some valuable Diamond versions in game and an All-Star Shane Bieber serving as the ace to acquire. With a 90 OVR Kris Bryant that towers over the free 87 OVR Rolen as the championship reward in this Mini Season, it might be worth plowing through the campaign this weekend.

Also on offer through the goals? 54,000 Season XP, 50 total The Show packs, and a smattering of Headliners, Ballin' is a Habit, Deluxe, and Premier packs, as well as the usual cosmetics.

April Spotlight Program Continues With Rhys Hoskins, Cal Raleigh, Chandler Simpson

The April Spotlight Program's fourth drop comes with Rhys Hoskins as the 89 OVR reward path player, and 89 OVR versions of Cal Raleigh and Tyler Mahle in its store pack. But the most exciting player in the entire release might be an 86 OVR card.

That would be Chandler Simpson, the ultra-fast Rays prospect whom Tampa Bay called up last week. Simpson's beyond blazing speed has made him a sprinting highlight reel in college and the minor leagues, and he's earned rightful buzz as a potential challenger for the stolen base crown in the majors. As his bat is off to a hot start, with hits in all five of his MLB games so far, he's also well worthy of the instant Diamond card in DD, and that card being a perfect Speed/Stealing/Baserunning Aggression center fielder with 92 Reactions makes him a poor man's Pete Crow-Armstrong ... with better Contact stats. Simpson is unlikely to rip even doubles all that often, with pitiful 35 and 25 Power against righties and lefties, respectively, but speed plays in MLB The Show 25, and stocking a lineup full of speed demons just got easier.

The Hoskins is a strong power hitter with little else to recommend him, and is probably best suited as a designated hitter. Raleigh might be the big swinger's favorite card in the release, as a switch-hitting catcher with 111 and 110 Power on either side of the plate, but he also falls into the low-Contact, high-Power trope that plagues most catchers, and getting an 89 OVR Raleigh now, even if it does reflect an incendiary April in reality, means it'll be harder to get a better version of Raleigh with Contact that isn't a weakness until the summer months. And then there's Mahle, a soft-tosser whose effectiveness in real life rarely translates to The Show; this 89 OVR card is probably no exception, though its 99 HR/9 should be an asset against the CPU and 100+ H/9 and Pitching Clutch do give it PCI-shrinking powers.

As a reminder, next Friday brings the release of the April Spotlight program's last weekly drop, but it will be Tuesday, May 6 that sees the release of the Lightning and Retro Lightning collections and their corresponding 90+ OVR Diamond players.

First Attributes Update Coming May 2

What is coming next Friday, crucially, is San Diego Studio's first sweeping attribute-based roster update, which will shift Core Series players' ratings and rarities and presents one of the better Stub-making opportunities in The Show. We'll have some content on that in the coming week, but it suffices to say for now that most of those changes should be already baked into players' values and potential for upgrades or downgrades based on the MLB season to date, with only truly anomalous performances in the next several days likely to make any further alterations necessary.

If you're hoping Shohei Ohtani drops to a Gold, in other words, you don't need to root for him to strike out in his next 20 at-bats. He won't do that, and even if he did, he is a lock to remain a high-OVR Core Series Diamond and the most expensive of them.