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Welcome to another edition of baseball in-season fun! The 2026 Pro In-Season cards for History Maker Baseball make it possible for you to play along with the 2026 big league baseball season in real time. Play tonight’s game before it happens, and see how your result stacks up with the real thing! Pilot your favorite club through the “dog days” of summer and see if you can coax more wins from it the real-life manager does. Or, just enjoy your OWN brand of “baseball today,” however you’d enjoy it most.
This is the twelfth year that we’ve created an in-season card set, the fifth year for the “express” format: smaller cards, compressed rosters. We understand that while the interest in these cards is strong, the window of opportunity is small, about three months. So we’ve produced the set with economy in mind. The card design focuses on readability and print economy (black print, plenty of white space to save on ink/toner). ALL players for an individual team are contained entirely on a single page, which makes it great for one-off games as the season winds down.
Despite the focus on economy, experience has shown that about two-thirds of the players will get an identical or very similar card in the full-season set, and another quarter will be within a quality or two. When all is said and done, the in-season cards will be a strong representation of the actual 2026 big league season. So in that regard, we feel like this card set is an excellent option, as well as being unique in the hobby and a lot of fun to play.
Each team has been given cards for fourteen batters and ten pitchers. This means that some players with respectably solid contributions were not given cards. However, players who aren’t carded can easily be rated on your own, we’ve included a sheet of blank cards for this purpose. You can use the “how-to” guide if you own it, or the basic baseball trading card guide that was included with your copy of the game if you don’t own the “how-to” guide.
In most cases, we went with each team’s most-used players--but sometimes the most-used players were traded to another team! In those cases we opted to move traded players to their new teams and replace them, if necessary, with lesser-used players. This best recreates our objective of providing a card set that recreates the immediacy of “pennant push” baseball. Our “official” 2026 Pro Season card set will be published next spring and will provide the full complement of player cards.
Having produced this set for so many years, we know that there will be late trades and minor league call-ups who will make significant late-season contributions to their teams. You can track the latest trades and roster moves by doing a Google search for “MLB trade deadline tracker” or similar. We’ve intentionally de-emphasized the team ID for each card (found just below the fielding rating), so you can move players to new teams with minimal visual disruption. Again, we’ve provided a sheet of blank cards that you can use to fill in the gaps created by these as-yet-unknown moves.
Having said all that, it might be helpful to remember that History Maker Baseball’s “express” mode abstracts player performances already, so lesser-played players can be considered to be included in the game results without specifically having a card of their own. Of course, you’re welcome to make the cards for these players, especially if you’re expecting to go to full-play for some or all of your tabletop action!
A few other things to make note of before you begin playing...
• We’ve numbered the cards in this set (1-720), with the intent of helping you organize your cards and also to assist the community in coordinating player movement.
• The “homeless” former Oakland team has been assigned its future Las Vegas designation for this set.
• The pitcher cards include the optional TERSE and STRONG qualities to help with realistic pitcher usage. The STRONG quality is explained starting on page xviii of the HMB rules booklet. The TERSE quality has the reverse effect of STRONG: Starting pitchers with the TERSE quality get two innings FRESH, two innings SEMI-FRESH; relief pitchers with the TERSE quality get one inning FRESH, zero innings SEMI-FRESH.
• Player positions are indicated in the pentagon shaped crest at the upper left of each card. We’ve used standard baseball abbreviations like “CI” (corner infield), “CL” (closer) and so on. Starting pitchers are identified as “SP,” relievers as “RP.” Pitchers who served both as starters and in the bullpen are given the “P” abbreviation (i.e., #544 Shane Drohan), indicating that they can be used in either role. For non-pitchers, it’s understood that many players play multiple positions, and you should allow yourself reasonable latitude here. For express, you don’t need to be concerned with specific positions. For full-play, you can use the blank cards as stand-ins for lesser-used players, with no qualities neither good nor bad.
• With the designated hitter rule expanded to the NL, we’ve dispensed with batting ratings for pitchers. If you are “old school” and want to eliminate the DH rule, all pitchers are given the SAD SACK, UTILITY, SCRAPPER, EAGER and WHIFFER batting qualities.
• This year we opted to go with generic umpire cards for this set. We created cards for each of the 24 possible combinations of umpire qualities. The umpire cards are numbered, we’ve rated the 2026 umpires with a roster guide that provides the card number that corresponds to each umps in-season 2026 performance (umpires with “0” have no qualities). Or, you can use the umpire cards generically if you prefer.
Many thanks to Travis Jansen who collected the data used to create these cards. We hope you’ll follow along on the PLAAY Games YouTube channel as we stream live action with these cards over the next couple of months, including our annual “Fall Classic Pre-PLAAY” where we fast-forward to the end of the season, conduct playoffs and crown a champion--all while the actual season is still going on!