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A scintillating MLB postseason has only sort of been done justice by MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty mode. That's a problem. But there are solutions.
A Thrilling Tournament
There have been two different paths taken by the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays to the point we arrive at tonight, before Game 3 of the 2025 World Series.
The Dodgers have been dominant almost all postseason. Outside of two dreadful innings in which they have allowed five runs to the Philadelphia Phillies (thanks to Clayton Kershaw's latest and perhaps last postseason blow-up) and six runs to the Blue Jays (on a World Series grand slam, mostly), the Dodgers have laid waste to their foes via an offense that has largely churned along without much contribution from Shohei Ohtani -- who nevertheless authored what was immediately anointed one of the best single-game performances in MLB history in closing out the Milwaukee Brewers -- and a pitching staff doing Herculean work, most notably by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who is on one of the finest postseason runs in baseball history, and an arguably incomparable one in recent memory.
The Blue Jays, on the other hand, have been a bit dramatic. George Springer's three-run dinger to catapult them from despair to delirium in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series obviously joins the rarefied air of signature homers in Toronto autumns, but the Jays have also gotten here through trying times, doing so without winning three straight games in any one series and having battled back from both 0-2 and 2-3 series deficits against the Seattle Mariners to deny that franchise its first Fall Classic appearance and make its own first full bid for a World Series trophy in 32 years.
These are compelling and different storylines that mean a ton to fans of those teams and have been delightful for more neutral observers. And they have decidedly not been fully capitalized on in MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty, which is a shame.
The Problem of Tick-Tock Content
The main reason this postseason hasn't been magical in Diamond Dynasty is structural: San Diego Studio is clearly set up for a tick-tock content drop model over the course of DD, in which whatever development team is responsible for the live content in the mode targets Tuesday and Friday for substantial content drops, with Tuesday's often being smaller and Friday's being much bigger. This is, to be clear, probably a wise decision by SDS on multiple levels, as it allows for workers on a typical Monday-Friday schedule to both bring out tentpole content more often than not on most of the Fridays during an MLB season while also reacting to a weekend's developments in the real world of baseball if necessary on Tuesdays.
(That it is a cadence that also produces content that entices the players who will pay to access content on Fridays, when most working people in the Western Hemisphere get paid and/or begin a stretch of dozens of hours that have leisure time, is surely not coincidental, but is also no great flaw to fault in SDS' strategy: The team-building modes EA Sports and 2K operate in their sports games all have similar cadences, with most content releasing on Friday, and many other games on live services models function similarly.)
But what works as a strategy for a year of content plotted out on calendars doesn't always allow for the agility to make tactical changes on the fly. When Ohtani hits three home runs and strikes out 10 to make jaws drop and gums flap, players will naturally want to recreate that feat -- or better it, with that same sui generis superstar. In Diamond Dynasty, players had to wait almost three days to do so, obtaining Ohtani from the 2025 Postseason collection after the October 20 release of an NLCS program with players that could be earned to unlock the absolutely absurd 99 OVR Ohtani who pitches like an ace and hits like a truck ... and whose feats on the mound and at the plate happened on October 17.
Similarly, if perhaps less frustratingly, Blue Jays fans had to wait until late in the day on October 21 to recreate Springer's homer on October 20, as SDS missed its normal content drop time of 3 p.m. Eastern -- the time zone Toronto is in -- and released the ALCS program closer to 5 p.m. Eastern on that Tuesday. This isn't exactly unforgivable for a development studio located in California, and it's probably more unreasonable than not to expect those developers to be in the office or at their work stations at 6 a.m. local time on a day when a full 9-to-5 shift might be the only way to get satisfactory work product out at the expected time for those who consume it.
But the downside of the production model being used is clear: SDS couldn't get players the Ohtani most would have loved to use over the weekend after his legendary night until the following Monday, and the Springer that Blue Jays fans wanted the instant he rocketed that homer into the seats was delayed, too. (No, the irony of someone publishing a piece about delayed content several days after its release should not be lost on you -- but in my defense, I am but one man and I was away from my Xbox while my sister got married. SDS has slightly more bandwidth, I imagine.)
And that downside is also evident in the lack of World Series content after two fantastic games of the Fall Classic: As of the day of Game 3, there is no content in Diamond Dynasty tied to Addison Barger's grand slam or the Blue Jays' barrage in Game 1, nor is there any content related to Yamamoto throwing a second consecutive complete game in the MLB playoffs, a feat so astounding that his first complete game got a DD card that mentions on its face that it was the first such game in the MLB playoffs since 2017. The only promise made about World Series content, in fact, is a bullet point on the Coming Soon calendar in Diamond Dynasty that says the 2025 World Series program is set for "10.TBD" -- which is now assured to be a missed date unless one of the Blue Jays or Dodgers sweeps the next three games in Los Angeles, as Games 6 and 7 are, if necessary, set for October 31 and November 1, dates that one imagines will push the World Series program's arrival to some day in November.
That these batches of postseason cards have been very powerful and fun to play with -- they are, to be clear, shiny toys, not disappointing baubles -- cannot fully compensate for them being somewhat slower to appear than most would have wanted.
So What's the Fix?
With the caveats that I am not a video game developer nor intimately familiar with all of the processes of the job, I do think that there are options available to SDS that could address these pain points when it comes to live content really and truly needing to be as timely as possible for it to be perceived favorably.
First, the tick-tock model needs to have some built-in agility and flexibility to allow for one-off moments to be properly celebrated. And this should seem easy enough to accomplish: If players are going to get content on a weekly cadence on Fridays (and/or Tuesdays), then the team that is responsible for that should have flexible members or a support team dedicated to turning around one or two cards or pieces of content as needed. (And, to its credit, SDS does do good work in this regard when it comes to milestones over the course of the MLB season: Think of the Kershaw, Mike Trout, and Justin Verlander cards dropped as part of siloed, one-off programs, or of the Ryne Sandberg program cobbled together shortly after his passing.)
That weekly cadence seems largely within SDS' capacity, so hiring out whatever marginal support staff is necessary to be in the on-deck circle for events requiring a quicker response would seem like a matter of resource allocation. Maybe it's just a matter of one or two staffers being on a slightly different -- read: earlier, or East Coast-based -- shift schedule and producing whatever assets are necessary to grease the wheels for a team that takes over later in the morning?
Second, the tick-tock model probably needs to go out the window when a weekly cadence isn't the best way to release content. While Diamond Dynasty having weekly and monthly programs tied to the MLB season and an overlay of other programs -- its Inning programs, Team Affinity, and the various other programs planned out in the months of the offseason for the next year's game -- providing consistent content for the player base works from March to October (no pun intended), the MLB postseason demands a different content cadence.
Ohtani having one of the greatest games ever could have been followed by a special Saturday drop of an Ohtani card outside of the collection model -- one that has been exhausted and exhausting in Diamond Dynasty this year -- that required players to match or beat his feats to acquire a card worthy of the performance ... you know, not unlike the one that came to Diamond Dynasty a year ago, when Ohtani inaugurated the 50/50 club, and players had to smash 50 homers and swipe 50 bags to nab a card commensurate with that accomplishment.
Perhaps being open to postseason performances necessitating a shorter turnaround and fitting those into a larger lattice of programs -- a Springer or Ohtani or an Aaron Judge for his mammoth effort in a series loss -- that contribute to a collection but are not constrained by it would enable this flexibility?
Or maybe it would make sense to have the standard-bearers for playoff teams get cards that could upgrade with their teams' successes, so that the work of building and balancing those cards is largely done at the outset of the event? SDS obviously can't predict when Ohtani or Kyle Tucker or Julio Rodriguez will have a seminal postseason moment, but it can prepare for the idea that they will, I think, and produce one or two players to represent a team as it enters postseason play. And this would enable fitting those players into the greater Team Affinity framework -- say you needed 30 or 40 cards from the pool of all the non-Live series Dodgers released this year to obtain this hypothetical Ohtani -- or the largely neglected Captains mechanic, deepening the importance of Postseason players near the end of the Diamond Dynasty life cycle in a way that respected and rewarded all the time (and money) invested by players over the course of the year.
Regardless of how SDS might choose to soup up postseason content, it seems clear to me that it could free up some of the time and resources on the development side by deprioritizing ancillary content like the Spooky program, whose function right now seems to be generating low-effort content that isn't particularly difficult for devs to churn out but also isn't particularly interesting to the player base. While there are some excellent cards in the program -- and some nice winks at "spooky" elements of MLB players, like including Kodai Senga and nodding to his "ghost fork" pitch -- their presentation leaves much to be desired, as I cannot imagine anyone who is a diehard fan of Greg Maddux or Stan Musial wanted their likely best cards in Diamond Dynasty this year given an art treatment of them obscured behind jack o'lanterns or standing in front of shadowed telephone poles.
If the only meaningful content in October in MLB The Show is related to the playoffs -- maybe both near-daily content tied to the current postseason and a more robust program calling back to feats of yesteryear as the month progresses, maybe with Extreme thrown in for good measure -- then I think the player base will understand.
