Being a cover athlete for an annual sports game is a highly prized achievement, as there is usually just a lone athlete for each franchise every year. Being a cover athlete is about more than just being good at the game you play, too, as cover athletes also usually need to have big personalities and public profiles to be selected. That is why Mike Trout, one of the greatest baseball players in history, but a quiet personality on a cursed franchise, has never found his way onto a cover for MLB The Show.
Earning the honor isn’t always great news, however, as it’s believed that cover athletes often regress following the campaign that put them on boxes, often more accurately a reversion to the mean after an outlier performance to get the nod. Reddit user Mazzocchi decided to test just how true this was, and the results may surprise you.
Anything Madden Could Do, The MLB Series Could Do Too At The Turn Of The Millenium
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There’s no cover curse more famous than that of the Madden Curse, which held that any player selected to be on the cover of the game was sure to have not just a regression but often a disastrous year due to significant dropoffs or season-ending injuries. When you get into the numbers from Mazzochi’s research, however, it becomes clear that this was true for the MLB series of games, as well.
The first five cover athletes all had WAR dropoffs before a brief correction, with the next four managing to go up, even if the first three did so by a combined .9 WAR. David Wright had a major leap forward as MLB 07: The Show cover star with a 4.2 boost, but the bad times came back soon after with five straight downward seasons and eight of the next ten cover athletes going down, and a ninth being the retired cover athlete, OG Ken Griffey Jr, in his Hall of Fame induction year.
In total, from MLB 2000 to MLB The Show 18, 14 athletes had worse years by WAR, and just five had better ones. The average result for a cover athlete was a WAR dip of 1.215.
Cover Athlete Selection Bounces Back In The 2020s (With A Catch)
As the 2020s drew near, things changed for cover athletes. Excluding Javier Baez, who had the poor luck to be on the cover for the shortened and pandemic-ravaged 2020 season, four of the next five players were better in their cover years than the year they earned it, starting with Bryce Harper’s 2.8 WAR boost after being on the cover of The Show 19. With a net-WAR improvement of 2.04 per year, things have looked up, which is good news for MLB The Show 26 cover athlete Aaron Judge, as he will be tempered by his own 2.1 dip in 2018, and two of last year’s three cover athletes all regressing.
