How could MLB The Show screw up Marlins player ratings this badly?

It is admittedly going to be difficult to anticipate what sort of production most Miami Marlins players will provide this season given their brief MLB track records. The obvious exception, of course, is Sandy Alcantara. The last time he was healthy for a full season, Alcantara was the league's most productive pitcher. This spring, he has reverted to Cy Young-caliber form and he's still in the prime of his baseball career at age 29. He is unequivocally the club's best player.

Alcantara's character in MLB The Show 25 will not reflect that, though. As revealed on Wednesday in anticipation of the game's release later this month, he'll begin the 2025 season with only a 78 player rating (the maximum is 99).

Fans took to social media to express their disapproval. So did fellow MLB players like Marlins shortstop Xavier Edwards.

The top-rated Marlin in MLBTS is Alcantara's protégé, Eury Pérez, at 81. Injured left-hander Braxton Garrett is tied with Alcantara as a 78. Otto Lopez (77) and Griffin Conine (76) lead the position player group.

At the start of the ratings reveal special, senior live game designer Ruairí McCann was asked about the methodology behind the ratings and said this:

"We're looking at a lot of stats. We're looking at a lot of analytics, a lot of data, and put it all together, it gets all the attributes you have on a player. Any attribute you look at, you can go to a stat, some metric, and it really does give you a one-to-one. That's our goal: always putting the one-to-one, our game to real life."

However, McCann later shared that there is also some subjectivity involved. While discussing somebody else who's coming back from an injury (Matt McLain of the Cincinnati Reds), he said that ratings drop whenever a player misses the whole previous season. Looking back at MLBTS 24, Pérez was an 89 overall and Alcantara was an 83. Both of them were sidelined throughout 2024 while rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. If the game had simply left those ratings unchanged, I bet there'd be much less public backlash.

From both a run prevention and peripheral standpoint, Garrett was slightly better than Alcantara when they were last rotation mates on the 2023 Marlins. Still, it's hard to rationalize how they currently share the same overall rating when Garrett's upside is so much lower and he's coming off an injury-marred season of his own.

During the past year, Conine has ascended from organizational afterthought to likely member of the Opening Day roster. In a late-season, 30-game sample in the majors, the powerful outfielder was an above-average hitter and an above-average defender. Easy to root for considering his father is a two-time World Series winner with this franchise and part of the inaugural Marlins Legend Hall of Fame class.

With all due respect to Conine, the juxtaposition of his overall rating being only two points lower than Alcantara's is embarrassing. He accumulated 0.7 bWAR during his initial cup of coffee, which would merit this rating if you could confidently extrapolate that over the course of a full year. Realistically, the chances of him overcoming his well-documented contact issues to maintain that pace are remote.

If I was in charge of MLBTS ratings, this is how I'd rank the top five Marlins:

1. Sandy Alcantara
2. Eury Pérez
3. Xavier Edwards
4. Ryan Weathers
5. Jesús Sánchez

Let me know if you like that better than what the game designers came up with.