Fielding may not be fun, but it could be more rewarding in MLB The Show 25’s career mode

Fielding is perhaps the unsung hero of every baseball video game. There probably aren’t many MLB The Show players who ask themselves, upon first firing up the new game each year, What’s new on defense? But of course, it’s just as important a pillar of the sport as pitching, hitting, or baserunning — as my beloved Yankees found out when they frittered away a five-run lead in Game 5 of the 2024 World Series, in what is perhaps the most mind-boggling, soul-crushing, Lemony-Snicket-ain’t-got-shit-on-this collapse in the 120-year history of the Fall Classic.

MLB The Show has now existed as a video game franchise for just about one-sixth of that time period — it began with 2006’s MLB 06: The Show, making this year’s MLB The Show 25 the 20th entry in the series — and for its entire run, the same person has led the gameplay team at developer SIE San Diego Studio. That has made the franchise a renowned model of consistency, but it also presents some challenges. Namely: With such a well-established, solid foundation, are you forever stuck tinkering on the margins?

“Every year, we’ll say, ‘Oh, we’ve added hundreds of new gameplay animations.’ And people will say, ‘Well, the game looks the same,’” said Sony’s Ramone Russell, director of product development, communications, and brand strategy at Sony San Diego, in an interview with me last month. These players are not entirely wrong, of course — when an annual sports game gets a few hundred items added to an animation library that numbers in the tens of thousands, players will likely need to spend a significant amount of time on the virtual diamond before their eyes catch something they’ve never seen before.

Part of the trouble when it comes to representing fielding in a video game is not just that it’s tough to make it as fun and engaging as pitching or hitting. It’s also difficult to convey the differences in skill between a league-average defender and a Gold Glove winner, at least in a way that doesn’t simply annoy players. In order to do that, the developers have to take some control out of players’ hands. Russell said there’s effectively a dice roll under the hood, based on certain in-game attributes that each fielder possesses, that helps determine how likely it is that any given player will be able to get to a particular batted ball. (Cue MLB The Show players wailing at their TVs when a seeing-eye grounder trickles into the outfield, just out of a defender’s reach.)

This is actually a change that Sony San Diego made for MLB The Show 24 last year, but the game didn’t communicate it to players in any way. Now there’s a visual indicator of how good a jump your infielder got on a ball: blue for the fastest reaction time, green for an average one, and yellow for the slowest. The gameplay connection here is that the fielding animation you see corresponds to the reaction time. Even if three shortstops with varying skill levels can each get to the same hypothetical ground ball, an elite defender will be able to field it more cleanly than the others, and transition to a throwing animation more smoothly and quickly; meanwhile, the lower-level fielders may stumble a bit as they pick up the ball, delaying their throw enough to allow the runner to reach base safely.

The developers’ goal is to make it “easier to see the difference between below-average, average, great, and amazing” infielders, according to Russell. “And hopefully you won’t get as mad when your shortstop misses this ball. You’re like, Why did he play that animation and miss that ball? It’s like, Oh, I see this yellow thing. That means he got a bad jump, and he got a bad jump because his fielding rating isn’t as good.”

As soon as Russell demonstrated how this system works in MLB The Show 25, I saw its potential to make my favorite mode, Road to the Show, more rewarding. I do get a lot of joy and fulfillment out of the career mode’s basic rhythm, which follows the languid pace of a baseball season. It’s the simple pleasure of jumping into another game and stepping up to the plate for another at-bat — a new opportunity to prove myself and raise my game — that keeps me going. But the grind can feel abstract at times, with such a gradual progression from promising prospect to big-league All-Star.

This year’s fielding feedback icons offer something concrete to work toward. The jump that an infielder gets is tied directly to their reaction attribute (REAC), which has tiers that correspond to probabilities on the field: If your player’s REAC rating is under 50, you’ll literally never see them get a great jump. But when you raise it to that threshold, it unlocks that possibility (albeit with a relatively low chance). Once you improve the attribute to 70, they’ll have, say, a 40% chance of getting a great jump. And an infielder with a 99 REAC will have the fastest possible reaction time on every ball hit in their direction.

I plan to spend hours upon hours in MLB The Show 25’s Road to the Show mode, as I do every year. But this time around, I’m particularly looking forward to raising my created player’s fielding abilities — something I’ve rarely thought about in the past — and anticipating the rush of satisfaction upon seeing that blue glow beneath his feet for the first time.

MLB The Show 25 is scheduled to launch March 18 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.