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The first month -- sort of -- of the 2025 MLB season has finished, with the week-plus of March MLB action bringing magic to many and real pain to Braves fans like your humble author. And in concert with that transition to April, MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty mode has added the Spotlight program that is replacing and integrating what were weekly and monthly awards programs from past iterations of the team-building mode.
With just a couple of series in the books, there's not that much to the Spotlight program as of now, but its debut reveals much of the design for the program going forward, and comes in conjunction with a Last Ride program that pays tribute to the twilight years of some of the greats of today and yesterday with a couple of AL East titans.
Spotlight Program Structure
The new Spotlight program comes with what players might have experienced with the Weekly Awards and Monthly Awards programs in Diamond Dynasty modes of the past, with the April Spotlight program being divided into multiple weekly "Drop" programs that will feature a few stars of the given week in MLB. For this first one, that means a reward path studded with Topps Now-branded versions of Rays left fielder Kameron Misner and Nationals hurler Mackenzie Gore as lower-OVR Diamonds and a capstone reward in the form of a Spotlight series 88 OVR Jordan Westburg that installs just another one of the many young Orioles seemingly set for stardom as one of Diamond Dynasty's best third basemen. Those three players are all earnable through earning program stars via moments, Parallel XP missions, and stat missions, and should be fairly easy to obtain through normal gameplay; they are also unsellable.
But there is also an exciting new wrinkle for moments masters, in the form of an Extreme-branded optional moment that challenges players to match the Yankees' back-to-back-to-back homers from Opening Weekend for 28 program stars -- more than half of the 50 needed to max out the reward path, and more than the 26 available via the other seven moments combined. That moment is only on All-Star difficulty and does feature no shortage of power in the (non-torpedo) bats of Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger, and Aaron Judge, but it won't be particularly easy to crank three homers without making an out given MLB The Show's hitting engine.
A less welcome return from last year's Diamond Dynasty is the presence of a parallel pack-based series of players in these weekly Drops, with this first one featuring two 88 OVR Diamonds (Nick Pivetta and Tommy Edman) and three 86s (Griffin Conine, the Athletics version of Max Muncy, and Austin Wells). While collecting these players is only an optional way to make progress in the program's reward path, and there is a single pack containing sellable versions of them, but the idea that some of these players being highlighted weekly will be earnable through gameplay and others will need to be luckily pulled from a single pack or obtained via the marketplace is a bit of a bummer -- especially because the Spotlight series players from these packs tie into a collection to be released at the end of each monthly Spotlight program with a Retro Lightning player.
The traditional Lightning player -- essentially a player of the month with a snazzy, electrified art treatment -- will be available by collecting all the reward path players, so it will be "free" in the sense that it will require only a gameplay grind. Those players for April will be released on May 6.
Last Ride Program
In addition to the Spotlight program, there is also a new and simple Last Ride program tied to that new series of cards in Diamond Dynasty. The headline is that the program brings with it two Diamond cards, an 87 OVR Mike Mussina and an 88 OVR David Ortiz, each tied to their last MLB seasons. The Mussina is definitely a control-first pitcher, as his primary fastball is a sinker that sits at 92 MPH, and is unlikely to be anything more than solid for most players, but the Ortiz is predictably a monster from the left side of the plate, sporting 97 and 96 Contact against righties and lefties and a hefty 105 Power against righties that makes him a terrifying threat to most starters in Diamond Dynasty even before considering a 106 Clutch that means he should be an RBI machine. Naturally, as this is an age-40 Ortiz, his defense is somewhere beyond woeful, so throwing him at designated hitter is definitely the move.
Players will need to complete a mixture of moments and Parallel XP and stat missions to unlock Mussina and Ortiz, but the stat missions are simple (innings pitched with Yankees and hits with Red Sox) and the Parallel XP ones are tied to any Last Ride players, many of which are available as Golds from Team Affinity.
