Pitchers and catchers will report to spring training for their MLB franchises in just a couple of weeks, and while there is eager anticipation among baseball fans of the year ahead, there is also concern about what will come of the season after.
An MLB lockout looks to be a significant possibility next year, and the resulting uncertainty has an effect not just on the real-world sport but also its virtual version in the form of the MLB: The Show series. As owners consider locking out players over what they claim is an untenable situation regarding player compensation, it leaves The Show developers in a tricky situation, allocating resources for its next game. If you’re concerned about how a lockout might impact the franchise, there are several good reasons to back you up.
The Show Already Struggles With Real World Contracts
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While The Show is generally praised among the various annual sports franchises, that doesn’t mean it perfectly nails everything — contracts are an area where the game experiences some of its greatest challenges. There are several reasons why contracts in-game proved to be such a tough task for developers to recreate in the virtual world accurately:
- Spending Limits Are Nothing: While a salary cap that teams must work with is the norm in other American major sports, as well as world football to an extent, with the financial fair play rules in place in domestic and continental leagues, that remains not the case in baseball. Even as a staunch anti-cap absolutist, I can see where this poses a problem for video game developers. Accurately modeling the vastly diverse ways that teams will invest in their rosters is a challenge that other sports franchises don’t have to work with, where you can simply assume that, as a general rule, all clubs are going to be at or around the salary cap limit when rosters shake out.
- Rising AAVs Are Hard To Predict: Another area where I can again be sympathetic to developers is in the difficulty they face trying to model for the acceleration of Average Annual Value on player contracts. Trying to exactly nail the way the economics of a sport will change in the future is a challenging enough task even when working with constraints, but the knock-on effect of no hard salary cap is a corresponding lack of cap on how much a player can make annually in a deal, and it leaves developers at risk of seriously over- or underestimating how things actually end up playing ot.
- Deferred Money Went From Punchline To Pro Move: When Bobby Bonilla accepted a buyout with the Mets in 2000, which saw him receiving $1.2 million every year from 2011 through 2035, Bobby Bonilla Day was born as a holiday where baseball fans got to laugh at the Mets. In 2026, nobody is laughing at deferred deals. Instead, they’ve gone from a way to get out of a contract you no longer want to pay to a way to make current deals more workable, as evidenced by the blockbuster Shohei Ohtani deal. The problem for developers is that there is simply no good way to implement this in a video game where the financial concerns of the franchise in 30 years are meaningless, making adding it as an option basically a signing cheat code you’d be foolish not use as much as possible.
Labor Uncertainty Disincentives Drastic Franchise Mode Alterations
On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer that a video game developer should be looking to do everything in its power to make its game as realistic as possible. When abilities within the hardware and industrial developments allow for a new element that can replicate real-world baseball in a fun way, it can feel obvious to assume it should be a top priority for implementation. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and not always for internal reasons. Sometimes it comes down to the sport being covered.
While it’s true that contractual negotiations have gotten drastically altered in recent years, creating a gap in The Show’s replication of real-world conditions, it’s also true that the sport itself is in a tenuous position. Owners are laying the groundwork in public for an upcoming lockout ahead of the 2027 season, and that may be discouraging San Diego Studio from investing too heavily in solving the massive contract problem.
Should a lockout occur, it can be hard to predict what the labor landscape in baseball will look like when it’s resolved. While it is clear where players and owners will prioritize getting concessions and, to their respective minds, corrections, what is uncertain is how that will actually resolve. We know nothing about what public sentiment will be at the time, how long the lockout could last, and who is more likely to get the better of negotiations when they come to an end, let alone the specifics of what will be negotiated.
Investing resources into the development of a new contract system in the game is a great investment, should MLB’s contracts look similar in five years to how they look today. If the league comes out the other side with a hard cap and max AAV provisions, then you’ve just devoted significant resources to the development of your annual franchise to elements that will only be relevant to one edition released for a season that may not even happen. For that reason, we may see San Diego Studio take a cautious approach to reworking contracts until it’s clear what its long-term future will be.
The Risk Of Falling Further From The Real World Little By Little
The problem facing developers at San Diego Studio is that falling behind on a real-world element in your development cycle can lead to a nasty spiraling situation. The longer you go without addressing a new element in real-world strategy, like modern contract negotiations, the more outdated your current engine becomes relative to the real world.
This means that the option to make smaller changes to correct course can quickly go off the table to the point where you need a total overhaul of a major system to make things right. Here are some of the biggest concerns about not staying as realistic as possible in development:
- It Feels Less Immersive: One of the best things about modern sports games is how immersive they can feel. Between the incredible graphics of modern consoles and PCs and decades of iteration on translating real-world sports into virtual representations, the best sports games, a list that The Show is accustomed to being included on, can really make you feel like you’re taking part in those sports. This extends to the off-field concerns, too, where gamers often enjoy getting into the mindset of a real front-office professional. The further the game shifts from the real-world challenges and opportunities faced in contract negotiations, the further it gets from feeling like a truly immersive sim.
- It Loses The Added Challenge Realism Adds: Making things feel realistic isn’t the only reason to care about accurately modeling the real world, however. Even if you’re strictly in your The Show franchise mode to play a game with no regard for its real-world ties, you simply lose out on the challenge of managing the more complex contract situations available in real life. One less thing to worry about when making your decisions is one less avenue to build and develop your skills to get better at the game and put a better team on the field for your games.
- It Could Accelerate The Push To Card-Based Modes: For some sports gamers, what’s going on in franchise mode couldn’t be less of a concern, as it has no impact in online play. Card-based modes like Diamond Dynasty are popular in every sports game that features them, but they have led to players who prefer to play the more traditional modes feeling a bit left behind as more resources shift to the online cash cows. Difficulties that make the development of Franchise modes more challenging, and the experience of playing them less enjoyable, leading to lower engagement from gamers, could see this dynamic shift even more toward card-based play.
Although the potential for a lockout next season shouldn’t have any impact on MLB The Show 26, the potential for problems in future editions remains. Do you think a lockout is coming, and do you think San Diego Studio would be wise to wait and see for themselves before investing too heavily in a financial overhaul for The Show, or do you think the time is right to get it right, and a lockout can be addressed if and when it impacts things?
