MLB The Show’s franchise mode has been in a “rebuilding” phase the last couple years. Not unlike an MLB franchise facing a reality check with an aging or expensive roster, the highs The Show’s franchise mode reached with features like year-to-year saves and Sounds of the Show gave way to a mode that lost a couple superstar features but could not find a way to replace them.
SDS has finally committed to trying to rebuild the “farm system” of features that were ignored, but when you’re so bereft of “talent” it takes a lot of time to restock the system. They have focused on the MLB Draft, free agency, trying to implement more of the real CBA, and even trying to get more accurate contracts and payrolls into the game. Those things have been improved to various degrees, but I don’t think the mode has discovered an off-the-field gem as of yet.
And, to be clear, this article is mostly going to be focused on the off-the-field aspects of the mode (see: GM and manager duties). In part, this is because I would argue SDS has found a potential “superstar” feature in Storylines that it can expand upon in future seasons to make the in-game experience even better. In addition, I’ll still mostly go to bat for how well the game plays, and the in-game presentation isn’t that far behind its top competitors.
However, off the field I’m not sure what the true “hook” of the mode is right now. I would argue this is the same reason something like Madden’s franchise mode also lags behind the competition off the field. In College Football, the hook is the recruiting. In NBA 2K, the hook is the vast amount of control you have over customizing the league itself. Whatever issues those modes may have, there is an element in those games that makes it worth playing through multiple seasons.
But in The Show? I can’t tell you what that off-the-field feature is supposed to be. Maybe it’s the Custom Game Entry Tool?
SDS has gone on the record saying they want people to get through franchise mode seasons in a somewhat quick and efficient manner. The irony is the best part of the franchise mode to me is playing every game because a lot of the off-the-field stuff isn’t very fun or engaging.
So I wanted to take some time to run through a couple aspects of MLB The Show 25’s franchise mode and talk about my current issues with them and potential ways to move forward and improve them.
Nuts And Bolts Do Come First
Before I get into some more specific items, I talked a lot about the franchise mode wishlist that SDS sent out to the community and covered a lot of stuff in there. I don’t want to talk much about the CBA and making franchise mode mimic the real MLB because those improvements should be a given. The draft doesn’t have enough rounds, the rosters aren’t big enough, and there is no “full league” customization that approaches what’s available in MyNBA Eras right now. These shortcomings have knock-on effects throughout the mode, but there’s not much more to say except “you should try to make the mode realistic” when discussing how to improve them.
So while I do think the mode needs a “hook” that gives us a reason to simulate games and therefore get through more seasons, the guts of the mode still needs to resemble the real MLB.
Progression, Progression, Progression
Beyond stating the obvious that the mode still needs to continue to figure out how to make progression and regression work for aging players and so forth, I would argue no sport needs a fun progression system more than MLB. I consider an MLB franchise mode to ideally be a mix of college football and the NHL in terms of how it should translate to a video game. You have loads of players in your farm system, and these players are going to range from very low to very high ratings. If you play MLB The Show, you know how uninteresting the whole system of progression/regression is right now.
My favorite progression system right now is the one found in College Football 25. There is some mystery to it, you have a little bit of in-season progression, and then a whole lot of who-the-hell-knows-what-will-happen wild swings of offseason progression or stagnation. You can’t ever quite solve it, and you’re never quite sure how it will come together. I’m not saying I want MLB The Show to steal the system outright, but we need more, well, wild crap to happen in relation to progression.
I also want to be clear in saying I think the idea of “training” sucks in almost every franchise mode. I don’t like it in Madden, I don’t like it in The Show, and I accept it in something like EA FC because of it being such a big part of soccer overall, but it’s not exactly fun there either. Yes, I enjoy the mini-games in Madden, but I don’t think “training” should ever be the main way progression takes place because ultimately it’s boring, easily predictable, and easy to manipulate. Overall, I don’t think we should ever have full “control” over how progression plays out. It should be heavily influenced by what you do on the field, and then have some underlying factors that go into it like age, potential, and something that is more sport-specific (I’ll explain that more in a bit).
I would consider Jackson Merrill a good blueprint for the sort of fun story that MLB The Show franchise mode needs more of right now but lacks. I’ll talk about the trade system later, but one issue with the trade system in ‘25 is that teams lose their minds when they have more than one quality player at a position and will ultimately make some terrible trades. For example, the Orioles will usually try to trade Samuel Bassalo (catcher and top prospect) for not nearly enough because they have Adley Rutschman.
Merrill was a late first-round pick, seemed like a great clubhouse guy, and was usually considered the Padres top prospect. However, he also had an injury that messed him up, he never played CF before getting to SD, and had only been at the Double-A level before the Padres gave him a shot. The rest is history, but that sort of thing is not something that happens much for me in The Show.
If it’s the AI Padres, he doesn’t ever get that call-up from Double-A, and he might ultimately end up getting traded since the AI doesn’t even have a real ability to change a player’s position — so maybe they think he’s blocked by Machado or Bogaerts and trade him for way too little. (The AI also can’t offer in-season contracts, but that’s neither here nor there.)
With a human, even if Merrill comes up and impresses, he’s probably not going to jump from a 68 overall or whatever to an 84+ in one year (whether that’s via in-season progression or a huge offseason bump).
We need those sorts of outcomes more often in The Show. Those shocks to the system are what will make people want to scout harder for gems or “high character” guys. We need those day-one stars to be a possibility because it’s fun, but also because those stars (4+ WAR players on cheap deals) are how the true “small market” teams should really win in this game — rather than how it works now where you usually sign far too many guys still or make trades to improve your team way too rapidly.
The management component of this would not be the “pipelines” system from a College Football — though I do think that system is more engaging than how the scouting system works right now in The Show for the draft. Instead, I’m more talking about “pipelines” in terms of player development itself. In last week’s newsletter, I talked a lot about how not everything has to be “sim” in a franchise mode. I think you should still lean into “gamifying” some elements to make them more interesting or accentuate the extreme outcomes that can occur in real life. This is one of those areas where I would go that route.
Some teams are just better at developing starting pitching while others are ahead of the game when it comes to guys up the middle of the field or developing power bats. Whatever your development strength might be, the point is that teams should have them in MLB The Show. Of course, you need to fix the trade system first so they don’t then trade these prospects/players for pennies, but that’s a given. I don’t have a set way you should go about implementing this system, but whether it’s coaching trees or based on how many players at a position are reaching certain overall thresholds or some mix-and-match components, the point is there’s way to make multiple areas of player progression way more engaging than they are right now in MLB The Show.
Contracts, Arbitration, And Player Morale
In the areas of player contracts and player morale, it’s all about creating conflict and how you go about resolving those conflicts. Things can have good and bad outcomes, but the point is there is tangible fallout from these situations. Oh, and I’m not talking about the boring conflicts that are engineered in a game like Madden. Answering stat-based questions about players at press conferences or needing to get some player “five receiving touchdowns” or whatever is not what I would consider an interesting conflict.
The Show has tried out versions of player morale in the form of hot/cold streaks and things players care about in free agency. I don’t think they go far enough. For one, I think the attributes are still far too static in franchise mode. I think most sports games are too dogmatic about player attributes staying mostly the same in-season because they tie into the sim engine and probably make other parts of the game unpredictable. Either way, in a a baseball game, you need to be a little more flexible.
Beyond hardened progression/regression, we could just use more volatility to player outcomes in all facets. Career years that never get touched again are a thing in real life, and while you can see some one-off outcomes in The Show, it’s not because the ratings changed drastically in-season before reverting again in the offseason, it’s because the sim engine just favored you that year.
If there were more ways to create some extreme outcomes, you might end up with more situations where some player then thinks they’re worthy of some fat new contract or a bigger role on the team, and you open up more situations for conflict that can be built into franchise mode. I’m aware that a “conflict” over contracts or playing time really only impacts a couple players on each MLB team every year in real life (Vlad Jr. is a good example from this season), but this is a video game where we can take some liberties if it makes the mode more enjoyable.
(As an aside, I think an inherent problem The Show has is that it doesn’t surface enough important issues in the menus, nor does it visualize them in a way that makes users think there’s a big problem. I have been playing some MVP Baseball this past week for another story, and I was reminded of the “smile/frown” player morale system that’s in those games. The morale system in that game didn’t explicitly change player ratings in the menu, but it did have an impact on their ratings in-game, plus you’d get e-mails about players being chapped about stuff, and it just brought some life to the day-to-day grind. You were aware of how players were feeling at all times in that mode, and so you focused on it because it was ever-present — even if it ultimately didn’t matter that much. The Show could do more with their own visuals in the menus to create these sorts of gameplay loops.)
I also mention arbitration in this section because this is an area of the game that is itching for conflict. Arbitration is baseball’s video game cheat code to me for a built-in way to cause messes. You want to squeeze somebody in arbitration or take them to a hearing? They should remember that, forever. You want to continue to take them year to year in arbitration rather than at least give them a contract that gives them a consistent salary through some arbitration years? They should remember that and hold it against you. It takes two to tango, and I wouldn’t expect the likes of the Pirates to give Paul Skenes a Fernando Tatis Jr. deal, but Skenes should ask for something like that (but probably even bigger) if he’s going to sign — if he’s going to choose to sign at all.
On top of that, both for free agency and arbitration we need a little more information on these screens. We should have a “comparables” part of the screen for what other players at a position got in each year of arbitration or know who is the top paid at a position while offering a contract because that’s the basis for how this stuff works in real life anyway. Agents want to one-up the last deal that was made, and it should be a built-in aspect of the contracts system (especially because there is no salary cap).
Free Agency Still Lacks Adequate Guardrails
For the purposes of this article, I wanted to point out how easy it is to do one-year turnarounds in The Show even without taking advantage of the trade system. Here is the record for the Pirates one year in the future with me in control:
I made maybe one minor trade, and I didn’t sign any of the “biggest” free agents. Still, I did focus on getting power bats, so here is the lineup that got me that record:
I got Schwarber on a two-year deal, Josh Naylor on a five-year deal ($16 million per year/5 years), and then Hunter Renfroe as extra backup off the bench.
And here is how the pitching looks:
The rotation is the same from the year prior (Oviedo came back healthy for the ‘26 season), but I signed almost an entirely new bullpen.
And then here is how the contract situation looks by the end of that second offseason:
Yeah, my left butt cheek the Pirates are going to have nearly $200 million in player salaries (I know it factors in all parts of the organization, but they still ain’t hitting that).
Look, I enjoy the concept of only having a certain number of players on my big board and thus limiting how many of the “top” guys I can ever really target in free agency, but this idea that free agency isn’t still a cheat code is incorrect. It may not be “fun” for some if you don’t let the Pirates get anywhere near $200 million in player salaries (at least not after just two seasons where only one was a playoff appearance), but I would counter by saying the fun is the conflict.
Tough decisions need to be made, and you really don’t need to make tough decisions about contracts in this mode outside of maybe the top players. Yes, I will need to give Skenes an exorbitant amount of money at some point, and he’s not going to let me buyout more than one or two of his free agent years, but I signed Oneil Cruz with ease even after he was coming off being an All-Star starter. The likely reality is that if Cruz became an All-Star, he’s no longer going to be interested in a long-term deal that takes up free agent years unless I wildly overpay, and I just didn’t need to.
Trades And The Relationships We Build
The last major area I want to touch on has to deal with trades. As with free agency, you can put self-imposed guardrails on yourself if you don’t want to exploit the system, but I’m not even so much worried about the “sim” aspects of it. Instead, I’m more talking about the dynamics of the system overall.
First, there are still too many in-division trades, and I already mentioned the issues with teams not caring enough about their excess quality players at positions as you go deeper into franchise mode. But beyond the borderline bugs, trades are about relationships, and most sports games just don’t factor that into the system enough.
GMs build-up relationships over time because maybe they worked together in another spot or have done deals with each other before, and that could matter here to some extent, but I think the relationships should be more about how you treated one another.
We need to stop with this system of being able to continually offer a trade while just changing one small thing each time. Other GMs should hang up on you at some point. You should get a reputation for being difficult to deal with if you constantly offer bad trades. This reputation should follow you and make it so most GMs don’t even want to answer your calls if it gets bad enough.
In the same way you should get a reputation for being cheap if you force players to go to arbitration every year, the same could hold true for how you conduct business. There should be an incentive to offer your best deal right away and then walk away if they don’t accept.
The Show certainly needs to create more situations where it becomes abundantly clear X Player is going to test free agency and that GM more or less says the best offer will get him at the deadline, but we also need a system that is better about the day-to-day dealings.
Trades are a cornerstone of franchise modes, and they should still happen, but especially in a baseball game we need to create an environment where offering trades comes with very real risks.
Bottom Line
As I said at the start, it’s ironic that SDS wants to streamline franchise mode enough to get people to play multiple seasons because my biggest problem with the mode is what’s the point of playing multiple seasons? I don’t mean for that to be overly harsh because I still like playing franchise mode, but I think SDS needs to ask themselves the question, what’s the appeal of simulating rather than playing the games? Right now, playing a majority of the games is vastly superior to simulating 85 percent of the games in order to play more seasons and spend more time as the GM. The mechanics of team building don’t live up to the mechanics of the gameplay on the field, and until they’re closer to equal, I think that will continue to hinder franchise mode.
At the end of the day, I enjoy reaching Year 10 in my College Football 25 dynasty because I enjoy building the team each year, doing the recruiting, seeing what players will progress, improving my own head coach, seeing what awards I will win, and seeing how other schools will evolve. And I don’t even think the mechanics in CFB’s dynasty mode are that deep or robust. They just seemed to prioritize the “fun” and I would say it worked for them in year one of the reboot considering the community voted it sports game of the year.
I can’t say I ever feel a major desire to reach Year 10 in MLB The Show 25’s franchise mode because it doesn’t have some of those same sorts of enjoyable gameplay loops, and that’s the problem. We need more depth and realism, but unless it’s actually enjoyable interacting with all these features within franchise mode, it won’t matter how much of the CBA is in the game or even how many rounds there are in the MLB Draft.
Published: Apr 25, 2025 6:50 PM UTC