MLB The Show 25 players over on the r/MLBTheShow subreddit are blowing up over the game’s Franchise Mode roadblocks. It appears that fans are unable to recreate MLB’s wild offseason spending, such as the Los Angeles Dodgers signing Kyle Tucker to a whopping $60M/year deal. Roster tinkerers hit a hard annual cap at $45M AAV, translating to $180M over 4 years. In real life, Kyle Tucker’s new four-year contract is confirmed at $240 million.
Salary Caps And Legacy Bugs
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You’ll often hear from baseball fans that the MLB isn’t fair, and the financial disparities among teams have long been a point of contention. With contracts like Kyle Tucker’s, the argument that the “Dodgers are ruining baseball” pipes up again and again. Whatever your opinion may be on this, it’s clear that even MLB The Show is not prepared for the Dodgers’ antics. The community consensus is that the game is currently suffering from “legacy code debt,” where ancient programming foundations are struggling to keep pace with the modern hyper-inflation of professional sports.
For example, as one user pointed out, you can’t go over 255 team homeruns in a season, as once you go 256, it resets to zero. Another user explained that this is due to integer overflow, a limitation in how the game stores data. The game uses an 8-bit variable for that specific stat, and an 8-bit number can only reach a maximum of 255. When the game tries to add one more to reach 256, it requires a 9th bit. Since the code is programmed to only look at the first eight bits, it drops the leftmost number, resetting it to zero.
This technical bottleneck suggests that the $45M contract cap is likely another symptom of this aging architecture. Just as the home run counter cannot handle a 9th bit, the financial systems within Franchise Mode seem hard-coded with limits that made sense a decade ago but are now obsolete. One user jokingly said the following:
“Probably for the best so the AI isnt giving out $80 million/yr mega deals to a 38 year old Aaron Judge.”
Without addressing some of these issues, the game itself falls behind the reality of a sport where contracts like Kyle Tucker’s aren’t just a fantasy.
