Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
MLB The Show hits a high standard for total sales
Mat Piscatella, who tracks video game sales numbers for Circana (and thankfully for me, is a big fan of baseball video games), reported this about sales numbers for the latest The Show game:
Here's a fun one I missed yesterday: During September, MLB The Show 25 surpassed MLB The Show 23 to become the 2nd best-selling game in franchise (and the baseball sim genre) history in the US. It trails (and is unlikely to catch) only MLB The Show 21. Source: Circana Retail Tracking Service
— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 2:11 PM
MLB The Show 25 has improved on its recent predecessors after all, at least in sales. The pandemic-era hit MLB The Show 21 remains easily in the lead, according to Piscatella.
The Show 25 also currently ranks eighth year-to-date in 2025 for best-selling video games overall. It fell behind Madden and Borderlands 4 this month, previously ranking sixth overall.
Several people on the Bluesky thread above theorize that removing The Show 25 from GamePass this year boosted sales, but Piscatella doubts this. He indicates that sales rose similarly between the PlayStation and Xbox platforms between The Show 24 and 25, despite Xbox users having “free” access to 24 through the GamePass subscription service last year.
To do my best to explain the sales increase: Road to the Show seriously improved this year. Adding high school and college to the start of the mode is a great “back of the box” feature, adding some great flavor to the early part of the mode. But most importantly, getting to choose what attributes to improve makes the mode so much more interesting. If you want to sell out for nothing but Power vs. RHP, or Speed, go for it. If you want to spread your points around, it’s an interesting little decision to make every few games. Much, much better than attributes only increasing based on your play, or based on a player archetype that you choose right at the start of the mode.
Shohei Ohtani Pawapuro meme
I don’t talk that much about real baseball news here. But it’s worth mentioning that Shohei Ohtani had the consensus greatest individual performance in baseball history last week.
This meme went viral on Japanese Twitter, putting Ohtani’s stat line from NLCS Game 4 in the format of Pawapuro. Here is the title character, Pawapuro-kun, doing his typical postgame summary of his accomplishments like you’d see after a game in Success or MyLife modes:
“I faced 22 batters and struck out ten, giving up two hits and no runs. And I went 3-for-3 with three homers and three RBIs.”
There’s something understated and funny about his little proud look that makes this one sing.
Pawapuro Scenario Mode moments in real life
This series of videos from Matsui on YouTube shows real NPB clips that come from Scenario Mode in Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu games. There’s no particular order for the clips, but they tend to come from the older Super Famicom games in the series.
Scenario Mode is like a Moments mode in MLB The Show: A mode for recreating famous real-life baseball events. Mostly, I just love seeing lots of good, clear TV footage of big moments in older NPB games, and the video game angle helped me find a collection like this one.
Song of the Week
“Atsuki Hoshitachiyo” by… the Yokohama BayStars. I’m not a BayStars fan, but this is objectively the catchiest team theme song in NPB. And each year they record a version inexpertly sung by the players (you can see links to the old ones in the video description on YouTube). The chorus is an instant earworm, with lots of good opportunities for English speakers to sing along:
“Whooaaaa, whoaauuwhoaauwhoa… De-ennu-A BayStars”
“Yokohama… Dash!”
“I Love Yokohama!”