MLB The Show 21: How to swap any team’s stadium in RTTS or Franchise

Custom baseball parks — a new, and long-awaited feature in Sony’s MLB The Show series this year — are finally available in all modes of the game. In the runup to the game’s launch next week (with early access for pre-order buyers beginning Friday) it wasn’t clear that players’ creations could be used in the series’ enormously popular Road to the Show career mode.

But they can.

Moreover, users may swap ballparks in and out for all 30 MLB teams, and even their two minor league affiliates (all of which play in fictitious, bush-league parks in-game). This means that, in addition to created stadia, classic ballyards like Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, or Manhattan’s Polo Grounds, can be your virtual superstar’s destination upon reaching the big leagues. Custom stadiums are only available in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game.

MLB The Show 20 let players customize uniforms and swap around a team’s stadiums last year, but only in the full-team Franchise mode.

Now, in The Show 21, you can go over to the League menu, in the clubhouse hub world, and check out the “Stadium Assignment” menu option. It looks like this:

Image: Sony San Diego Studio/SIE via Polygon

If you’re playing in Franchise mode, look for it in the League tab on the main menu page:

Image: Sony San Diego Studio/SIE via Polygon

You may change a team’s stadiums at any point during the season.

Interestingly, not only is Atlanta’s Truist Park still the scene of the All-Star Game in this game (for now; one assumes that will change with a patch), you can even use its All-Star decked-out version all season long, for the Braves or anyone else.

In real life, Major League Baseball has moved the All-Star Game to Denver’s Coors Field, in protest of the Georgia legislature passing new voting restrictions and regulations widely condemned as partisan and anti-democratic.

There are 23 fictional minor-league parks, two fictional spring training fields, 30 custom ballpark templates (that are either ready for play as is, or yours for the tinkering) and 12 classic stadiums from real life to go with the 30 MLB ballparks and the All-Star Game option. If you want the Toronto Blue Jays playing home games on a Grapefruit League field, just like they are right now, you can do that, for example.

Image: Sony San Diego Studio/SIE via Polygon

Me? I made Crosley Field, which was demolished in 1972, the home field of the Cincinnati Reds once more. So when my slugger makes it to the Show, he’ll be scooping up throws from Eugenio Suarez at The Ol’ Boomerang.

But with so much depth in the creator, and dozens of tools, options, and little touches to use, it will take a few hours to get a sense of what the tool has to offer. And with custom parks shareable through the game itself, including across different platforms, it’s a solid bet that The Show’s large community will quickly develop some great looking yards and virtuoso replicas of long-forgotten fields.

I mean, come on, someone has got to do Cincy’s neoclassical Palace of the Fans, with its colonnade and “emperor’s box.”