When I reviewed MLB The Show 20, I praised it as the best baseball simulation around while dinging it for playing too safe, recycling visuals, and leaning on marginal improvements instead of taking real swings. Six years later, I’m getting deja vu. Despite giving MLB The Show 21 a standing ovation for finally starting to mix up the formula in its jump to next-gen (at the time) consoles, I’m now sitting here with MLB The Show 26 struggling to articulate what’s meaningfully different from the last few years. The iterative additions are better than usual this year — especially in Franchise mode — but the foundation hasn’t moved an inch, and I can’t help but feel like MLB The Show 26 is little more than another full-priced update for the same live service game we’ve been playing since the 2010s.
To its credit, MLB The Show 26 still plays excl o jellent baseball. The core simulation remains the most convincing recreation of the sport in any video game, and developer San Diego Studio hasn’t regressed the way Madden and NBA 2K have in recent cycles. And if you’ve never touched MLB The Show before, this is the best entry point the series has ever offered: A streamlined first-time setup walks you through every hitting, pitching, and fielding interface before you throw a single ball. But if you have played before — even as far back as The Show 21 — that familiarity has inevitably become the problem. The approachable onboarding is wasted on people like me, those who have been here for years and are still waiting for a reason to feel like they haven’t.
This year’s gamevplay additions don’t do much to close that gap. Bear Down Pitching is the headliner, a system that rewards you for consistently throwing strikes and racking up strikeouts by banking special high-accuracy pitches you can deploy in clutch situations. It ties into your pitcher’s Clutch rating, and in practice it meaningfully tightens your command — pitching as Seattle’s Bryan Woo, I could feel the difference when a Bear Down pitch locked inside the zone with an accuracy I wasn’t getting on standard throws. It’s the most interesting mechanical addition in years, and the one thing I’d point to as a genuine reason the on-field game feels at all sharper. Less impressive is Big Zone Hitting, which simplifies the PCI to broader quadrants of the strike zone. I hit more balls into play than I expected, but it trades the surgical precision that made zone hitting rewarding for something flatter. More contact, fewer moments where I earned anything with my swing.
There’s also a depth-of-field toggle that blurs the b ackground while batting, and PitchComm, which pushes pitch call audio through the DualSense controller speaker when playing on PS5 — a nifty trick that doesn’t actually move the needle. The under-the-hood models now incorporate real-world pitch usage rates, meaning your pitcher’s less-frequently-thrown offerings are harder to locate. That one’s subtle and good. But the list of new mid-match stuff doesn’t stretch much further than that, and two smart tweaks alongside a handful of toggles is not a $70 leap from last year. It’s a patch.
Road to the Show has received the most visible additions, though “visible” is doing some heavy lifting here. The addition of 11 new colleges and the officially licensed NCAA College World Series gives the early career arc more texture than it’s ever had. Smart Sim — which lets your OVR rating drive simulated stats so you can skip games without torpedoing your career — respects your time in a way previous entries didn’t, and getting automatically pulled back in before a big moment is the kind of attention the mode has needed for years.
