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Few sports franchises have managed to be as consistently good as MLB The Show, and that makes it an even bigger honor to get selected as the year’s cover star. Every year, much like in Madden and NBA 2K, a player is chosen as the defining star for the upcoming season. Any time you talk about a cover athlete, you also have to discuss the “curse” associated with it. Baseball players are notoriously superstitious, but is there any truth to such a curse in the MLB The Show series, or does it pale in comparison to the Madden curse?
Well, it seems to depend on the year. Much of the time, as you’ll see detailed below, the MLB The Show cover star actually has a pretty great season when they’re selected, and occasionally even put up better numbers than the year before. However, there are also a couple examples of absolute disasters, whether it be from injury or some unexplainable dip in performance.
We wanted to determine, once and for all, if the curse was real for MLB The Show, or if it had the opposite effect. To do this, we went through the entire franchise and looked at season statistics for the year each athlete was on the cover as well as the year before it. The results are encouraging for most of these stars, but if your name is Yasiel Puig or Javier Baez, you’re probably wishing you declined the offer. It remains to be seen what fate MLB 23 star Jazz Chisholm will meet.
Here is every cover star in MLB The Show history.
