MLB The Show crushes Mariners fans' Cal Raleigh dreams with big announcement

Cal Raleigh's 2025 victory lap is pretty much over, but Seattle Mariners fans had room to dream of one last stop before the 2026 season. Maybe, just maybe, he would be chosen as the cover athlete for this year's edition of MLB The Show.

There are well-deserved honors, and there are "Well, obviously that was deserved" honors. Raleigh scoring the cover of MLB The Show would have been one of the latter after his 2025 season, which saw him become a national sensation amid a historic 60-homer campaign.

Alas, there's bad news: Whoever (or whatever) goes on the cover of MLB The Show this year, it won't be "Big Dumper."

MLB The Show's big announcement crushes Mariners fans' Cal Raleigh dreams

After putting three players on MLB The Show 25 last year — those being Paul Skenes, Elly De La Cruz and Gunnar Henderson — the official X account for the long-running video game series revealed on Monday that this year's game will "not have a new cover athlete."

Does this mean that this year's edition will feature a repeat of a previous cover athlete, such as Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani? Does it mean there will be another throwback choice, a la when Ken Griffey Jr. graced the cover in 2017? Does it mean there will be someone or something other than an athlete, such as Rob Manfred or even Ohtani's dog, Decoy?

Who knows, honestly? That's for the folks and Sony Interactive Entertainment and San Diego Studio to know, and for the rest of us to find out.

Even so, it's perfectly OK to be bummed out that this means Cal Raleigh won't be on the cover.

Griffey aside, he would have become the first active Mariner to ever get an MLB The Show cover. It also would have been a nice little "Take that!" to Judge won the AL MVP at the end of 2025. That was one of those well-deserved honors, but frankly not one of those "Well, obviously that was deserved" honors — don't at us, Yankees fans.

Then again, there has been talk of an MLB The Show cover curse over the years. It's mostly bunk, but Henderson and De La Cruz might beg to differ after last year. And before them, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr., Javier Báez, Yasiel Puig and Joe Mauer fell victim to some kind of misfortune after appearing on the cover.

Given this history, maybe the best thing to do is agree to agree that Raleigh not being on the cover of MLB The Show is actually a good thing. And if the rationale for his snub is revealed to be because his world-famous backside didn't fit on the cover, at least that will be understandable.