Is MLB The Show 25 Teasing Us With A Multi-Player Cover That Includes Elly De La Cruz, Paul Skenes, And Gunnar Henderson? Seems Like It!
Baseball and video game nerds, rejoice! It seems as if we are getting hints dropped right in front of our faces about who will be gracing the cover of MLB The Show 25, last year we got Vladdy Jr, the year before that was Jazz Chisholm (????), and before that it was Shohei Ohtani so they usually get it spot on when choosing the cover athlete. This year we've got tons of great options, a few guys jump off the page when you think about it. Could it be Bobby Witt Jr? Gunnar Henderson? How about Juan Soto in his new Mets uniform, maybe Francisco Lindor? Paul Skenes is a good candidate, as is someone like Elly De La Cruz. Then out of nowhere Elly drops this Instagram video and The Show fans loved it, well deserved cover for Elly coming off of his fantastic season in 2024.
Slam dunk pick here, like the fastest dude in the game, a true up and coming STAR in every sense of the word, he is your prototypical video game cover athlete. He tweets out the video wearing a cowboy hat for some reason and announces he's the cover boy and we all just accepted it. Then I'm scrolling IG and I see Yak standout Gunnar Henderson post a video.
Gunnar posts this video with some sort of filter on it? He says he's actually supposed to be on the cover and says Elly needs to call him. At this point no one knows whats going on, dueling covers? Could it be? Maybe a "choose your own cover athlete" kinda thing going on here? I think Gunnar should be the solo cover guy, but what do I know? An Elly/Gunnar collaboration would be pretty cool, two of the best shortstops in baseball if you ask me. And thennnnn we get another video on social media from the most vanilla athlete around, Paul Skenes.
We get a video of Skenes and his monotone voice letting Gunnar and Elly that he was actually supposed to be on the cover and they have to get it figured out before it drops in mid-March. Now we're all very confused and no one knows if this is going to be a 3-way cover with Elly/Gunnar/Skenes or if you're going to be able to choose who you want to be on your cover, a cool concept. They couldn't go wrong with any of these three guys, let alone all of them if you ask me. All very deserving and all are incredibly talented up and coming stars in baseball, faces of their franchises as well. A 3-way cover would be very cool and would satisfy most baseball fans if you ask me, so that gets my vote for what they should do. I also kind of hope these guys just went rogue, like maybe they haven't talked with SDS and they're just doing it on their own. Pretty soon you're going to have Brenton Doyle from the Rockies saying he's on the cover, would be a hilarious troll by them.
I also realize that not everyone loves video games like I do, especially The Show but it's always cool when we get a new game with new features and cover athletes. And who cares that you usually don't physically buy the copy of the game anymore? Still cool one of your favorite players is on the front of it and the loading screens. Virtual downloading has changed the game for the better but I do miss a good midnight release for Madden before they fucked that game up beyond repair, luckily The Show has taken over and is an incredible sports franchise with each year's version of the game being fantastic. I know there is also going to be the "who cares about this? Video games are childish" crowd, let's just calm down. It's okay to have different hobbies, some people create burner accounts and troll folks online, I happen to like building up my Orioles franchise to win 124 games a year and cruise through the playoffs, we all have different interests.
Hoping we do get the 3-way cover, or I can just buy the Gunnar version by itself, a cool honor for these 3 guys regardless. Being on the cover of a video game is what you dreamed doing while growing up, covers used to mean something, so cool for them for hopefully being able to call themselves "cover athletes". Great job here by The Show and SDS if this was their roll out, got people talking and VERY excited for the release of the game.