MLB The Show Video Game Adds Female Baseball Players: ‘Women Pave The Way’

The MLB The Show video game series is supposed to represent a hyperrealistic representation of professional baseball in video game format. 

Years of development and attention to detail have focused on recreating fielding movements, hitting animations, dugout celebrations and even incorporating spin rates and exit velocities into programming. As with most sports video games, you'd assume that the release of a new title each year would focus on adding new gameplay enhancements, modernizing graphics or refining existing modes. 

This year's upcoming release of MLB The Show 24 though, is apparently focused instead on altering their "Road to the Show" mode, about growing into a Major League Baseball player, to include female baseball players. For the low, low price of $70, you can now experience the jaw dropping realism of what they describe in a X post on Tuesday as "Women Pave The Way." The mode unlocks the dreams of the many hundreds of minor league female baseball players of making it in Major League Baseball. Obviously, this is a very common career path for women, especially considering that the average fastball velocity around the league has now reached 94mph.

It's unclear whether or not the game will depict female pitchers as being capable of throwing upwards of 100mph or say, hitting 470 foot home runs like Aaron Judge.

New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge. Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports

MLB The Show Celebrates Its Inclusiveness

An interview on the PlayStation blog pats Sony Studios and the MLB The Show team on the back for their work on inclusiveness, unrealistic as it may be. It even adds "a unique-to-women storyline following a lifelong friendship as it develops in professional baseball." 

It's a confusing addition to a video game that's come in for criticism based on its graphical performance being stuck on the previous generation of consoles. And for one that prides itself on realistic simulations. 

There's nothing wrong with including women necessarily, but what market is Sony Studios trying to hit here exactly? The dozens of women who buy MLB The Show every year? Was there a massive demand for spending valuable hours building this new feature into the game at the expense of other, more realistic, changes?

MLB better hope that the developers didn't lean too far into the realism by incorporating the league's new see-through pants for its female characters.