Here's Who Should Be Most Excited About Pro Spirits Baseball

Summer has belonged to Madden (and now CFB) for many years, but this year is shaping up to be a little different as eBaseball Pro Spirit 2026 is set to arrive on July 16.

We’re also getting a new Backyard Baseball and a new EA UFC game this summer, so it’s going to be a busier than usual stretch for sports gamers, but today is all about Pro Spirits and who it is likely to speak to.

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Because as much as we might all love sports games, we are not a monolith in terms of what we like and care about. Even among the most veteran of OSers, some of us still have priorities that do not align with everyone else’s.

This is normal. This is okay. But with that in mind, I want to put a bunch of us into buckets and hopefully make you all aware of what this game will and will not be.

Now, I may not know exactly what Pro Spirits will play like since I’ll be basing my thoughts on prior experiences with the series, However, it’s safe to say this won’t be a monumental changeover for the franchise, so I feel pretty comfortable going down this path with you all.

Konami, like most sports developers/publishers, doesn’t tend to rock the boat too much year to year if there’s not a massive window of time between the games because you can only do so much in a short(er) amount of development time.

Regardless, even if you’ve read about my prior explanations about Pro Spirits here and here, I want to get a little more granular now and explain who will like this game more than others.

I hope everyone checks out Pro Spirits regardless because we definitely want Konami to bring more of these games back to North America (we should all want Power Pros and Pro Spirits to both get translations), but that doesn’t mean it’s going to speak to everyone.

So let’s jump into things by starting with the most obvious group of people.

The Dirt Lovers

I say it with love, but the people who give The Show a lot of crap about their dirt and grass are usually talking about a bigger issue they have where they don’t think SDS is making enough graphical improvements year over year.

Well, Pro Spirits uses Unreal Engine 5 and puts it through its paces in many regards. I think one of the best ways it shows off its power is genuinely via its dirt. The scans of the real players and some of the weather effects probably get the most love (rightfully so), but the variety in terms of the dirt and grass/turf is substantial in this game.

In part, it’s by default because the NPB doesn’t play on just grass, so you’ll by default see more shades of green and varying types of turf — plus different lighting because there’s more domes to account for as well.

But beyond that, the dirt really does feel and look different from The Show’s, especially in the batter’s box.

Some of you might think the dirt/grass arguments on OS get silly, but I hope you can see there’s some real life to that dirt in the screenshot above. We want to see pitchers digging their plant foot into the mound and other stuff like that, and Pro Spirits gets closer to that than The Show — on top of having better graphics overall.

The “wow” factor comes from shots like these:

But moment to moment, it’s the fields themselves that help sell the graphical quality nearly the same amount.

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