Long before video games were good enough, I was making my own baseball games. RBI Baseball on the NES with full made-up leagues tracked in a spiral notebook in pencil — divisions, schedules, week-by-week stats, standings I'd update by erasing the row and writing it again.

When I wasn't doing that I was throwing a ball off the front of the house, off the garage door, or into a pitchback rebound net in the backyard — inventing rules for whatever the bricks or the strike-zone target did to the bounce, much to my parents' delight.

I bought big sheets of cardboard from the craft store to make my own card-based games for imaginary seasons. And I bought Baseball Weekly every single week so I could track real stats the way the magazine did.

Video games kept getting better. Real seasons, real stats, online play. Then Diamond Dynasty showed up and I could build my own team and play real opponents — and I still found myself tracking pitch tendencies and strike-zone tells by hand during games, because nothing in-game did it the way I wanted. I'm a software developer, so eventually I just started building the tools I kept wishing existed.

What this is (and isn't)

I've used ShowBase and ShowZone for years. I pay for both of them, and I'll keep paying for them. This isn't a post about how anyone else is doing it wrong — they aren't. I'm not building DiamondOps to replace those tools or beat them. That's not the goal and never has been. They do what they do well, and I open them every day.

The honest version is simpler: I enjoy building tools for this game almost more than I enjoy playing it. I'd rather design an analytics view than grind one more Conquest map. So I built the things I personally kept wanting, and at some point realized other grinders might want them too.

DiamondOps is an incubator for Diamond Dynasty ideas — mine to start with, yours soon. It's meant to sit next to the tools you already use and do the things they don't. The bigger goal is a community where we can all build cool stuff related to the game — where you tell me what you wish existed, I tell you what I'm tinkering on, and we figure out together what's worth making next.

What's in it right now

• OpScore — a difficulty-aware card rating. OVR flattens out fast on All-Star and means almost nothing on Legend. OpScore reads the same card differently depending on difficulty, because the game does. Full methodology post coming.
• Market stuff — flip opportunities ranked by profit after tax (not headline spread), trending cards with the noise filtered out, hourly buy-and-sell windows, anomaly detection when a card moves outside its rolling average. The tools I built for myself while grinding stubs to afford the cards I actually wanted.
• Portfolio + watchlist — your collection valued in real time, plus a list of cards you don't own yet but want to track.
• PitchGuessr and PitchTunnels — two side ideas I built on my own a while back. Coming to the web soon for paid tiers.
• Sim, grid, packs — games I built because I like building games. Not the point of the platform; just there because they were fun.

Who it's for

The grinder who tracks pitch tells and parallel paths in their head. The player who cares about quirks, missions, and which 89 is actually more useful on Legend than some 92. If you Quick Sell every NMS card the day you get it and never think about it again, that's a perfectly valid way to play — this just isn't for you.

FREE gets you most of it. The paid tiers unlock portfolio tracking, push alerts, the watchlist, and the deeper data. We're not building a freemium trap.

What's next

This is the part I actually want help with. DiamondOps is meant to be an incubator, and I want the next round of tools to be things the community asks for — not just what's in my head. I have a long list. So do you. The comments open up soon, along with a way to suggest and vote on tool ideas.

Stuff I'm tinkering on right now: an OpScore methodology writeup, a piece on whether Lightning, POTM, and Topps Now drops actually predict Live Series upgrades (the answer's more interesting than the consensus), and a calculator for tiered PXP stacking.

I'm Shaun. If something in here is wrong, or you've got an idea you want to see built, tell me when the comments are open.