Truth or LIES: MLB The Show 26 Franchise Mode Edition

With MLB The Show 26 having been out in early access for less than a week, there hasn’t been enough time to dig into every corner of the game, but there has been enough time for me to bring back the hit game show: Truth or LIES.

I have reserved this game show for EA games in the past because they’re the ones who put out 100-page Dev Notes for their games pre-release. SDS doesn’t do documentation like that, and their streams are only so full of info, but I think there’s enough here to make this worth the time.

We have an official OS Account that you all can sign-up for 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.

And speaking of which, please join the OS Discord. We have two community events coming up. Our March Madness Bracket challenge STARTS TOMORROW SO GET YOUR PICKS IN NOW BECAUSE THE WINNER GETS A MARCH MADNESS CHAMPION OS-BRANDED SWEATSHIRT. Just RSVP with your OS Account here then join the ESPN Bracket.

The event is open to anyone with an OS Account (free or otherwise).

If you’ve somehow been living under a rock and have never experienced this make-believe-award-winning show of mine, basically I look at what was said pre-release and see if it really ends up being true or not.

I’ll be tweaking this one slightly to be adding a couple areas that weren’t really mentioned one way or another to give some more flavor and depth, but mostly this is a “checking your work” type of deal.

It’s not even to hold the developers’ feet to the fire, it’s more just to give you all context and awareness about what’s going on in my eyes right now. With that said, let’s jump into it.

The Trade Engine Is All New: TRUTH (But…)

I don’t think there is any disputing the newness of this engine. It’s way different than any prior trade engine in the game, and I have some beef with it in some areas, but it is absolutely new.

Not just the new features like Untouchables and the delay on accept/reject change the dynamics, but the aggression is very obvious in terms of how much teams lean into their current situation. Teams go all-in on being buyers/sellers, which has positives and negatives, but it’s clear that at least a system is in place now and can be manipulated further in the future to make it better.

I take that as a positive overall because at least now I understand the general rationale behind moves happening in the game, even if I disagree with the level of aggression some of the time.

The trade engine was a little weird right at launch, so I’m happy I ran another test franchise this week before writing this because I was seeing more concerning things pre-patch. For example, teams were trading freshly signed long-term contracts, and I was seeing far too many Untouchables stacking at certain positions on certain teams.

The Untouchables can still be a little confusing in terms of who the teams are sometimes choosing to protect or not protect, but the Untouchables do change throughout the season so it sort of just depends when you look. It might be based, at least a little, on who is injured at the time as well so that also might be making it a little weirder at moments than others.

But the point with the Untouchables is the Paul Skenes and Konnor Griffins are protected no matter what, and so even when these teams are hitting PEAK sell-off aggression, they won’t get rid of their top stars who still have long-term potential on a team.

The worst trade in my tests I came across was probably this one between the Mariners and Orioles:

I do always need to remind people that you have to take the names out of it a little bit. We always say “this would never happen!” and it’s usually because we look at the names first. The Mariners were out of it already in June and the Orioles were going for it, so that part checks out.

The issues are would the Mariners give up 3 years of control on guys like Castillo and Munoz — both were having down years — for zero top-end prospects? The Mariners have A LOT of pitchers to pay in the coming years, and they only dumped expiring contracts (and Matt Brash) in their other deals they ended up making, but the Munoz part especially was a little perplexing.

They got three top 10 prospects from the Orioles’ system but didn’t get Beavers or George or Basallo (so no Top 100 prospects). It is worth noting Basallo was one of those guys always being traded pre-patch, but the Orioles did pay him in real life already, and now he’s not getting moved anymore in-game, which shows the patch did work in terms of keeping new long-term deals in their place.

But if this is the worst trade I had happen in my tests, that’s still a massive improvement over Judge and Julio and everyone being traded in prior games.

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