MLB Legends Who Will Never be in an MLB The Show Game

Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds is baseball's anti-hero. A legend, a home run leader, and at the center of one of MLB's biggest controversies in their history, the story of baseball couldn't be told without including him. But that hasn't stopped MLB The Show players from requesting and demanding Bonds to be in the next game. After all, he'd probably have max stats across the board. He is a career .298/.444/.607 batter with an 182 OPS+. Bonds has 762 home runs, the most ever, and hit 73 dingers in 2001, the most in a single season. You could make a milestone based on those two achievements, but you could also give him a milestone card for his seventh MVP award, which is the most any player has ever received. With nearly 1,000 more walks than strikeouts, he'd definitely have 125 plate vision and discipline.

But Bonds will likely never be in the game, or any baseball video game for that matter, and it doesn't even have to do with any of the controversy he was a part of. Bonds wouldn't give up his name and likeness rights when he was still active in baseball during the early-mid-2000s. In MVP Baseball, EA would substitute Bonds for a generic player named John Dowd, who was the best player in the game. Then, in MLB The Show 16, SDS replaced Bonds with another made-up player named Reggie Stocker. The following season, SDS had another fictional player, Pepe Alazar. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of the return of Dowd, Stocker, or Alazar as a pseudo-Bonds replacement in a future MLB The Show game, but I doubt we will ever see the actual Barry Bonds in any future MLB game, and I'm not just talking about MLB The Show.