SDS's Postseason Roster Update Mostly Watched the Playoffs

SDS's postseason roster update for MLB The Show 26 mostly watched the playoffs. On November 6, SDS raised the overall rating of 111 Live Series cards and lowered one. Ninety-eight of those 111 upgrades went to the 12 teams that made the postseason.

And it went by round. The further a playoff team got in October, the more of its cards went up.

My two Diamonds got split by the bracket

I own two cards that show it exactly. My collected Francisco Lindor and José Ramírez both fell to 85 on September 11. I wrote about that in the previous part of this series.

Ramírez went back up to 87 on November 6. SDS listed contact against right-handers +11, clutch +9 and power against right-handers +6. Cleveland played into the American League Championship Series.

Lindor didn't move. He isn't in the update at all. The Mets missed the playoffs.

Both are still in my collection. Same rating on October 2. Same rarity. Two points apart now, and the only difference I can find is that one of them was still playing in October.

Nothing like the other big updates

SDS calls this one its Postseason Roster Update, and it didn't behave like the six big updates before it.

Every big roster update of the season, cards up and cards down. The six before November listed rating changes for 716 to 774 cards each; November 6 listed 172. Source: SDS's roster update notes.

Every one of the six before it lowered at least 184 cards. This one lowered one. It also listed rating changes for about a quarter as many cards: 172, against 716 to 774 for the others. The other big updates re-rated more than a third of the Live Series set each time. This one re-rated mostly the part of the game that was still playing.

The small updates between the big ones went all-upward sometimes too. Six of them had no downgrades at all. But none of those listed rating changes for more than 33 cards.

The bracket, in cards

Cards whose overall rating went up on November 6, by team. The other 17 teams that missed the playoffs had 9 between them. 111 went up, 1 went down. Source: SDS's roster update notes; 2026 MLB postseason results.

The Brewers won the World Series, their first, and got 17 upgrades. More than any other team. The Rays lost it to them in five games and got 13.

Below that it steps down a round at a time:

Among the 12 playoff teams, no team that went out earlier got more upgrades than a team that went out later. The only exception anywhere was the Giants, who missed the playoffs and still got 4, one more than the Red Sox and Cubs.

The size of each bump barely changed by round, though. The average upgrade was between +1.9 and +2.8 for every group of playoff teams. A deeper run got more cards moved, not bigger moves.

They were small moves, mostly. Sixty-nine of the 111 were one or two points. Part 1 of this series found that two of every three OVR changes this season were that size, and this update ran a little under that.

The champions' 17

Here's every Brewers card that went up:

Nine of the 17 changed rarity. Nine were pitchers. Ashby's +8 was the biggest jump in the whole update, on any team.

That's most of a bullpen, the World Series MVP behind the plate, and a long tail of depth cards in the 60s and 70s. Chourio was already a Diamond and got two more points on top.

The top of the game

If you only care about the cards people actually put in a lineup, the picture is the same. Seventeen cards finished the update at 86 or higher after going up. All seventeen are on playoff teams.

Cam Schlittler of the Yankees went 91 to 92. Tarik Skubal of the Dodgers went 90 to 91. The biggest steps up there were four points each: Ben Rice, 85 to 89, and Bryan Baker, 83 to 87. The Yankees didn't get past the Division Series.

So a team didn't have to win anything. It just had to still be playing.

Clutch was the October rating

Pitchers took 70 of the 111 upgrades. My guess is that fits how October gets played, with the bullpen throwing a lot of the big innings.

The rating SDS touched most often on upgraded cards was hits per nine against right-handers, on 48 of them. Second was pitching clutch, on 46. Every pitcher whose clutch changed went up, except one. Hitter clutch moved on 18 cards, and 17 of those went up too.

My read is that clutch is where SDS put October. That's a reading, not something SDS said. The update notes list the numbers, not the reasons.

Four new Diamonds

Thirty-six cards changed rarity, and every one of them moved up. Four crossed into Diamond:

Contreras was the World Series MVP. His card went from Gold to Diamond nine days after the last out. Behind those four, 18 cards went Silver to Gold, 10 went Bronze to Silver and 4 went Common to Bronze.

William Contreras's card on diamondops.gg, every roster update that touched his card this season (OpScore is DiamondOps' own card score). 81 after October 2, 85 after November 6. Captured November 6, 2026.

The other 18 teams

The 18 teams that missed the playoffs got 13 upgrades between them. The best card among them was Cal Quantrill, who went from 74 to 75. No card that finished above 75 went up on a team that missed.

Ten of the 13 were pitchers, two were catchers and one was César Prieto at third base. Eleven of them started below 70: Riley Cornelio 57 to 63, CJ Van Eyk 55 to 60, Joey Estes 59 to 64. They aren't new cards. SDS added no new cards in this update, and 12 of the 13 had already shown up in an earlier 2026 roster update. But they skew young. Six made their MLB debut this season, the latest of them Nick Frasso on August 4. Two more debuted late in 2025. Four debuted before 2025, Adrian Houser going back to 2015. And Ben Kudrna has no MLB debut on record at all, so his card went up without him playing a big-league game.

So it's mostly players early in their careers: eight of the 13 debuted in the majors in August 2025 or later, and Kudrna hasn't debuted at all. Why now, and why these 13, SDS doesn't say.

And SDS really doesn't say. Eight of those 13 came with no rating listed at all. The notes just show a new OVR. Joey Estes went 59 to 64, Riley Cornelio 57 to 63, Ben Kudrna 58 to 63, and not one of them has a single listed change behind the number.

The rest of the league got one tweak

Thirty-one more cards from non-playoff teams and free agents showed up in the update without their OVR moving. Thirty of them had exactly one rating listed: CTRL.

Twenty-five of those 30 are pitchers, where CTRL is control, and it went both ways. Michael Soroka got +19. Hunter Greene got −9. Spencer Miles got +31, the biggest single change in the group, and his OVR still didn't budge.

The other five are hitters, which looked wrong to me until I checked. Nick Kurtz, Jordan Westburg, Rafael Devers, Shawn Ross and Leonardo Balcazar each went from 5 to 10. That's their pitching control. Every hitter's card carries pitching ratings, and SDS's own record for Kurtz's card shows pitch control 10, pitch movement 10 and no pitches. A first baseman's pitching control went up five points. It changes nothing you'd ever use.

None of those 31 changed rarity or OVR.

That's the whole ratings story for the 18 teams that went home: 13 upgrades on cards that finished 75 or lower, bigger per card than any playoff team's, most of them unexplained, and a CTRL tweak, nearly all of it. Twenty-two more of their cards got a position or role change, and no ratings.

The one that went down

One card went down in the whole update: Ramón Laureano of the Padres, 78 to 76. And it's on a playoff team.

SDS listed five changes, all of them down: contact against right-handers −7, contact against left-handers −7, vision −3, clutch −5, power against left-handers −3. He's the only hitter in the whole update whose clutch dropped. The only pitcher whose clutch dropped, Joel Peguero, plays for the Giants, who missed.

So the playoffs weren't a free pass. They were a second look. Most cards that got one came out better.

How I counted

Everything here comes from the attribute changes in SDS's own notes for the November 6 update, the ratings list on its roster update page. That's 172 cards, every one of them Live Series. I left out the 49 position changes, which move a card's position or role and not its ratings. I counted a card as upgraded when its overall rating after the update was higher than before, and I counted rarity from SDS's before and after labels, not from my own cutoffs.

Then I matched every card's team against how far that team got in the 2026 postseason.

Two honest limits. The notes don't always list every rating that moved. Eleven cards in this update changed OVR with nothing listed, and part 1 found more than a quarter of the rating changes unlisted on the three big updates it could check. And the team is the one on the card in SDS's notes, so a player traded during the season counts for his card's team.

One season is one data point

So that's how the postseason update played out. If a player's team missed the playoffs, his card almost certainly stayed put. Thirteen cards moved across 18 teams. If his team kept playing, the longer they played, the more of their cards went up.

It's one season. I'll check it against next November before I treat it as a rule.

Diamond Radar mostly missed this one. It reads regular-season stats, so it scored every card as if October hadn't happened, and its picks still hit about twice the chance rate, but only 15% of them came true, against 53% on October 2. That miss gets its own post, with the denominator.

Sources: SDS's roster update notes for November 6, 2026 (update 27), every listed change; SDS's news post for the same update, which calls it the Postseason Roster Update; 2026 MLB postseason results. Counts cover Live Series cards only, which is every card in the update. Ratings as of November 6, 2026.

I'm Shaun. If something is wrong, tell me.