MLB The Show 26 Continues Its Push With RttS and 'Controversial' Pace of Play Tweak

I’ve been upfront about my concerns with MLB The Show 26, and that SDS is fighting an uphill battle this year with its marketing for this year’s game. That said, the train is barreling down the tracks, and this week Road to the Show got the spotlight.

We now have an official OS Account that you all can sign-up for right now. I implore all of you, whether you want to subscribe to a paid tier or not, to go that site and sign-up. Go there, click the “Sign In” button and then use either Discord or your OS name to log-in and connect everything together.

It will make your life easier on the forums and Discord even if you’re just going with the Rookie/free tier. If you somehow have no account on OS or Discord, you can make a totally fresh account at that link as well.

And speaking of which, please join the OS Discord.

Career modes have never been my thing and will probably never be my thing, but I still enjoy following the year-to-year trajectory of them because they’re the “other” big mode for those interested in single-player modes.

RttS was at one point the premiere career mode in all of sports games, but the last few years have been more about course correcting away from things like Loadouts and trying to win back fans who did not like the way the mode structurally changed during the earlier part of the 2020s.

As is the case with modes like Madden’s franchise mode, it’s never good when you have to spend a lot of time “fixing” things that you technically broke yourself because you’re doing a sort of “spring cleaning” of your mode while still trying to add new stuff.

You don’t have enough time to do both things, and it inevitably can start a downward spiral where fans get frustrated about the mode feeling stagnant because you’re spending a lot of time simply getting the mode back to where it was before you made design choices that made people unhappy.

All that is to say, I believe SDS finally started to break out of that doom spiral last season, and so RttS fans had some reasons to be excited heading into ‘26. The week started with a YouTube video detailing the major changes.

From my seat in the nosebleeds, it seems like the core focuses for this year were expanding the amateur side of things, more flexible progression through goals and simulations, and adding more focus to your HOF end goal.

Since I don’t play the mode almost ever, I’m not a good judge of how great these improvements will be, but I do think the feedback has been a net neutral in the aggregate on OS — which is probably about the best you can expect since so many people have their knives out for the game this year.

SDS went into further depth about the RttS changes with their write-up, and then they also had a long stream going through the updates as well.

As an onlooker, I do think the cutscenes look pretty rough (the Manfred ones especially), and I assume the interactions will still be comical and cringey because that seems to be a feature, not a bug, of every career mode ever made.

But I’ll probably boot up and make a character if only to simulate to see the College World Series because it’s rad that’s back in a game.

Pace Of Play Invades Video Games

In my book, the “pace of play” stuff MLB has undertaken in recent years has been a big net-positive for the sport, and MLB does feel like it’s finally gaining new fans again after a long stretch of bleeding them.

(I think the NBA is now in the spot MLB was previously — the NBA is lost in the wilderness and will need to figure out how to win people back over after losing them via a variety of ongoing issues.)

Pace of play is also something that SDS has been looking at for a couple years to try and speed up online games while still maintaining the “core” of the sport. What they’re doing this year is removing full windups from online DD modes (and presumably normal H2H modes).

This means you will only pitch from the stretch (or slide step) online. To the surprise of no one, this change is causing quite a bit of rage, and I could argue it’s in part because it’s now a change to the “core” identity of the sport.

I sympathize with SDS in that baseball games do take longer than any other sports game. A 9-inning game is a non-negotiable for most folks — even if we had stuff like 7-inning games in online MVP Baseball games back in the day — while football games and basketball games are accepted in online environments with shorter quarters.

This means online games can genuinely take an hour, and so SDS is looking for ways to quicken the pace and get people into more games. Now, I think they’re also doing this because quitting is also a constant problem in online modes and so people rarely play “full” games for a variety of reasons.

However, this is probably not the way I would have gone about it. Kevin’s video above discusses the amount of foul balls you get in online games, and points to some other “time saves” that SDS could have looked at focusing on instead, but most of them are more time-intensive than toggling a set of pitching animations.

It appears SDS is also removing the “R2” ability while standing in the box, which is a much more popular change even if it did have a purpose if not used to troll. Sometimes you did want to press R2 to get a breath or look at the pitch sequence, but too often people would hold R2 every pitch to throw off your timing on the mound or drag out games.

These two things together are intertwined though because R2’s other purpose was if people were simply being psychos who were already trying to throw pitches every two seconds and you just wanted the game to resemble baseball a little more so you’d hold R2 to slow your opponent down a second.

That option is gone now, and in my head I can imagine someone slide stepping every pitch and some baseball purist looking on and being appalled by how the sport looks. This change will also make stealing bases even harder, and it’s going to mess people up who use Pinpoint pitching.

Before, maybe you didn’t want to use certain pitchers because their full windups took forever in online games, but now some people aren’t going to want to use other pitchers because their stretch and/or slide step motion is impossible to time up right.

In essence, SDS has probably replaced an old problem with a new one, and I don’t think this “pace of play” change is likely to have the same positive impact that some of the real life MLB changes have had.

Looking Ahead

Next week is going to be all about presentation, and as a presentation geek, I am excited for that one. I’m also a commentary psychopath, so I’m interested to hear about the changes there.

And then the week after will be franchise mode, and I’m sure everyone is going to be very happy and have no problems with the updates that are mentioned then…

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase