There were two questions I was looking to answer as I fired up MLB The Show 26. First, how much does the game cater to a baseball newbie like me? Second, will it keep me hooked enough to keep playing after my first few games?
I think it’s important to share some personal context. I have very limited experience with baseball. I have been to one MLB game, which was on my first visit to Canada as a teen. The lead-off Toronto Blue Jays hitter scored a home run on his first at-bat. Fireworks went off and everyone was going wild. Fun!
But that was the only score of the whole game. My dad and I (both lifelong soccer fans, for what it’s worth) were bored lifeless for the rest of the three hours.
An incredible run of a dog playing a baseball game at Games Done Quick aside, I had no real interest in the sport for the next couple of decades until the Blue Jays made a deep run into the 2025 playoffs. This time, now as a Canadian citizen, I bought into the excitement and watched all of the World Series last year. I was enthralled.
I slowly started to appreciate the nuances of pitching, the skill of trying to make every pitch look identical at the time the ball is thrown to hopefully hoodwink the batter. Friends who are in-the-know tolerated my most basic of questions about how everything works as the postseason wore on. Now, I’m planning to watch a lot more games this year and MLB The Show 26 arrived at just the right time to get me ready for the new season.
Sony’s San Diego Studio seemed to be speaking to me, personally, when the first thing the game asked me to do was select my preferred playstyle. The Competitive track was definitely out for now. The Simulation option offers an “authentic MLB experience that plays true to player and team ratings.” I wasn’t quite feeling that either. As a newcomer to all of this, I had to select the Casual style. That’s billed as “an easier, fun, pick up and play experience with an emphasis on learning the game.” Exactly what I needed.
I was immediately impressed with how deeply you can customize the gameplay, even if the vast array of batting and pitching options in particular felt a little overwhelming. Using both a thumbstick to aim and button to swing at the ball seemed too much for someone who has no idea as yet how to read pitches.
Dipping my toes in slowly was surely going to help me avoid getting too frustrated too quickly and uninstalling the game, so I chose to keep everything as simple as possible. I’m not switching off options like automated bullpen warm ups for a long time, if ever.
Finally, after about 20 minutes of fine-tuning some settings in the tutorial, it was game time.
The Dodgers didn’t know what hit ’em as I won my first game 38-0. I thought this Shohei guy was supposed to be good? Pffft, he didn’t even register a hit. His team only got a measly two players on base, while I had 46 hits. That blowout was a fun intro to MLB The Show 26, but I had to bump up the difficulty and make it a little more challenging if there was any chance of me sticking with it.
Instead of jumping into the Road to the Show career mode, an online match or another exhibition game to get my feet a tad wetter, I next tried the Storylines feature. This is what really drew me into MLB The Show 26.
San Diego Studio has been sharing the stories of several notable players from the Negro Leagues in the last few editions of the series. I know very little about baseball history outside of household names. So I was fascinated to learn about the likes of Roy Campanella, who debuted in the league as a 15-year-old catcher, and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, the league’s first female pitcher.
The developers did a fantastic job of connecting these athletes’ stories to playable moments from their playing careers. Cutscene insights from Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, tied everything together quite beautifully. Great stories are such an effective way to pull you into a sport and to start learning about it. Stories connect us more than just about anything else.
The default difficulty in the Storylines mode was much higher than I dealt with in my first washout game. Still, that gave me a chance to practice the Competitive playstyle without having to play a full game or the stop-start nature of the tutorial.
My pitching was less accurate, so figuring out how to compensate for that made for an interesting challenge. Batting was a lot tougher too, with balls travelling faster and pitchers trying to trick me. At first, I was swinging at every ball, but that clearly was the wrong idea. I tried to be more judicious and wait to see if a ball was breaking, but that meant I was swinging too late and fouling or giving the fielders an easy catch. That’s a tricky conundrum to solve, and I’ll need a lot more practice before I dream of playing online. I’m not even going to get started on how woeful I am at catching.
And yet all of this deepened my appreciation for baseball. There’s so much more nuance and complexity to the sport than I realized until a few months ago. And even as someone who doesn’t typically enjoy turn-based games, I found myself getting into the swing of it… so to speak.
I’m never going to care about Diamond Dynasty, MLB The Show’s take on Ultimate Team modes in EA Sports games. I can’t see myself diving into the team management-focused Franchise mode, in large part because I don’t yet have a strong enough understanding of stats to have a decent handle on what makes a specific player great in their role. And as much as I like the idea of the Road to the Show career mode — in which you can stick with a player from their high school days all the way to a Hall of Fame induction — I don’t think I can invest enough time into that to make it worth the effort.
I did find the answers to the two main questions I had about MLB The Show 26. It does a bang-up job of easing a baseball newbie like me into the fray. I’m eager to keep playing as well. I don’t think MLB The Show has quite enough pull to keep me away from my actual forever game, Overwatch, for too long. But I can absolutely see myself playing it on a second screen while streaming some MLB games this season. After all, I’m always on the lookout for a great story.
MLB The Show 26 is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/mlb-the-show-26-is-turning-me-into-more-of-a-baseball-fan-120000724.html?src=rss
