Two of Every Three OVR Changes This Season Were One or Two Points

TL;DR. SDS listed 3,513 OVR changes on Live Series cards this season, and two of every three were one or two points. For hitters, power moves the overall most. For pitchers, the biggest single driver is BB/9. It's a real rating, and it moved on about 300 pitchers in each of the three big updates I can check, but SDS didn't list a single BB/9 change all season, and this year's card pages on its site don't show it. On those three updates, more than a quarter of the rating changes weren't in SDS's list.

---

Most roster update moves are one or two points. That's the headline.

I started this with two questions I'd had all season. Which ratings does SDS actually move in a roster update? And which of those does it use to push an overall up or down? If I knew that, I'd know which ratings to watch going into the next one.

So I went through all of them. Every roster update SDS shipped for MLB The Show 26, from March 27 to October 2, card by card, straight from SDS's own update data. I checked it against our database, our public roster history and SDS's own update pages, and every OVR and every listed change matched.

Twenty-six updates, six that matter

SDS published 26 roster updates this season. Only 25 are different. The July 12 update is an exact copy of July 9: same cards, same changes.

Six of them are the big ones, and each changed 716 to 774 Live Series cards:

Every big update had more ups than downs. Across all six, 42% of listed cards went up, 32% went down and 26% kept the same OVR.

They came every three to five weeks, and they were about the same size every time. Every one had more ups than downs. October 2 had the best ratio of the six: 328 up against 184 down.

Across all 25 updates SDS changed 1,243 different cards, about 60% of the Live set. Count only the six big ones and take each card's whole season: of the 2,084 Live cards today, 31% finished the season with a higher OVR, 20% lower, and 7% were changed but finished at the same OVR. The other 43% were never touched in a big update at all. Fifty-eight cards changed OVR in all six big updates. George Kirby went down in every one. Reid Detmers went up in every one.

Most moves are one or two points

Forty percent of OVR changes were a single point. Seven or more happened 55 times all season.

Of the 3,513 OVR changes SDS listed, 40% were one point, 67% were one or two, and 80% were three or fewer. The biggest single move all season was 12 points: Antonio Senzatela, 54 to 66, on May 8.

The moves got smaller in the second half. The average OVR change in a big update held around 2.4 points through July, then came in at 1.93 in August, 2.11 in September and 1.93 in October.

And about one card in four that SDS lists in a big update doesn't change OVR at all. In the six big updates, it happened 1,179 times: the ratings moved and the number on the card stayed put. That's OVR being a polite fiction again. The ratings underneath changed. The card looks the same.

Over a whole season, small moves still add up. Reid Detmers went from 70 to 82 without a single move bigger than four points.

What actually moves the overall

This is the question I started with. For every card SDS changed, I lined up the OVR change against the ratings that moved with it, and worked out how much of each OVR change came from each rating. Hitters and pitchers separately, and cards that changed position left out, because their OVR moves with the position.

I'd have liked all six big updates for this. Three are possible. To see every rating move, you need the ratings saved just before the update and just after, and we only started saving them in late July: our main card data from August 20, plus a second copy of most cards' ratings from late July, which matches the main data exactly wherever both exist. That covers August 14, September 11 and October 2. We didn't save the ratings before May 8, June 12 or July 16, so those can't be done this way.

For hitters, SDS's own lists from all six big updates tell the same story, because the one hitter rating SDS doesn't list barely moves the overall: power first, vision last of the main six.

Power is about 40% of a hitter's OVR movement. For pitchers, BB/9 and H/9 against lefties carry almost 40%, and SDS lists neither.

Hitters: power first. Power against righties and against lefties are about 20% each, so 40% between them. Contact is about 31%, clutch 16% and vision 12%. Point for point, power counts most too: ten points of power moved the overall about 1.6, ten points of contact about 1.

Pitchers: walks and hits allowed. BB/9 is the biggest single driver at 22%, and it was first or second in each of the three updates on its own. Then hits per nine against righties (20%), pitching clutch (19%) and hits per nine against lefties (19%). Strikeouts per nine add about 19% between the two sides. Stamina barely registers.

One catch with BB/9. It's a real rating on every pitcher, and it moves. But last year SDS's card pages on its site showed BB/9 and HR/9, and this year they show neither. The ratings are still there in SDS's card data, and BB/9 is the one that tracks the overall. The Control you see on a pitcher's card is a different rating, it was on the card last year too, and it barely moves the overall. Jacob Misiorowski's card shows Control 49. His BB/9 is 70.

And here's the part that answers my question. Two of the four ratings SDS's update list leaves out, BB/9 and H/9 against lefties, are among the biggest drivers of a pitcher's overall. The other two, HR/9 and Plate Discipline, moved on hundreds of cards in all three updates I can check and did almost nothing to the overall.

So if you only read SDS's update list, you're missing two of the four biggest reasons a pitcher's overall moved. On September 11 and October 2, the listed changes alone account for about two-thirds of the ups and downs in pitchers' OVR changes. With every rating included, it's about 92%.

Speed, fielding and arm barely show up here, but that's because they almost never move, not because they don't count.

This is three updates of data, and the exact order shuffled a little from one to the next. What held every time: power was the top two for hitters, and for pitchers the same four ratings led, with BB/9 first or second. Treat the percentages as close, not exact.

When a better card moves, it usually goes down

Commons that moved usually went up. Diamonds that moved usually went down.

When SDS moved a Diamond's OVR in a big update, it went up 38% of the time. When it moved a Common, it went up 84% of the time. Every tier in between sits in order.

The ceiling is low at the top, too. No Diamond gained more than four points in a single update all season. A Common gained 12.

This only counts cards SDS actually changed. Most cards in any update aren't touched at all, so it isn't "a Diamond has a 38% chance to go up". It's "if a Diamond moves, it's usually down".

The Diamond line itself was a wash. There were 27 crossings up into Diamond this season and 27 down out of it. Exactly one card crossed into Red Diamond: Shohei Ohtani, 94 to 95, on June 12.

The left and right splits move on their own

Every hitter has a contact rating against lefties and one against righties. When SDS moved both in the same update, they went the same direction only 55% of the time. That's barely better than a coin flip. Power against lefties and righties looks the same (56%), and so do pitchers' strikeouts per nine (55%).

Compare contact and power on the same side. Those went the same direction about two-thirds of the time (68% against righties, 65% against lefties).

Juan Soto on October 2 is a clean example. Contact against righties went down 3, against lefties up 4. Power against righties down 2, against lefties up 2. His OVR didn't move.

Juan Soto on SDS's October 2 update page. His splits went opposite ways and his OVR stayed at 91.

So a card's line against lefties and its line against righties behave like two separate ratings. One can go up while the other goes down, and in this data it did, about 45% of the time when both moved. If you build around platoon splits, read the split, not the OVR.

Speed only went up. Defense mostly moved twice.

Speed moved 80 times this season. Every one of them was up.

Fielding, arm strength, arm accuracy, reaction and the catcher ratings barely moved at all. When they did, it was mostly on July 16 and October 2, and almost always up.

So if you're trying to guess whether a card's OVR will move, you can mostly ignore defense, which barely moved outside July 16 and October 2. Speed is the same story: it only ever went up, and never on more than 29 cards in an update.

What SDS's update list leaves out

For three big updates, August 14, September 11 and October 2, I can see the ratings before and after, not just the ones SDS lists: every rating on every card for September 11 and October 2, and almost all the cards SDS changed on August 14. We didn't save the ratings before late July, so May 8, June 12 and July 16 can't be checked this way.

On all three, SDS's update list (the changes it shows for each card on its roster update page) left out four ratings that moved constantly:

• pitchers' H/9 against lefties, about 300 cards per update
• pitchers' BB/9, about 300
• pitchers' HR/9, about 300
• hitters' Plate Discipline, about 240 to 260

SDS didn't list a single change to any of them in any of its 26 updates this season, on its update data or its update pages. The average move was about four points.

It isn't that SDS skips left-side ratings. In every update I can check, it listed every change to contact, power and K/9 against lefties, and it listed them over a thousand times each this season. It just never lists H/9 against lefties. On the October 2 page, "K/9 L" shows up 300 times and "H/9 L" doesn't show up once.

Here's one. On October 2, SDS listed three changes for Jacob Misiorowski, and all three went down: H/9 against righties, K/9 against righties and pitching clutch.

Everything SDS listed for Jacob Misiorowski on October 2. All three went down, and his OVR went up.

His OVR went up anyway, from 91 to 92. In the same update his H/9 against lefties went from 104 to 110 and his BB/9 from 67 to 70. Neither is on the list. His card page shows the 110.

His card after the update: H/9 vs Left is 110, up from 104. SDS's site doesn't show BB/9 on the card page at all.

On all three big updates I can check, more than a quarter of the rating changes weren't in SDS's list.

Those four ratings alone made at least 1,125 unlisted changes on August 14, 1,143 on September 11 and 1,164 on October 2, more than a quarter of everything that moved each time. Those four only ever moved on cards SDS did list that update. SDS just leaves those ratings off the list. Three more never make SDS's list either: Reaction against lefties, Baserunning Aggression and fielding Durability. They barely moved, 30 changes between them on October 2. Every change SDS did list ended at exactly the number it showed, so this isn't SDS getting the cards wrong. It just doesn't show every change.

That leaves May 8, June 12 and July 16. SDS never listed those four ratings in any update this season, and all three updates I can check show them moving at the same scale, so I'd bet they moved in those three too. I can't show it, because we didn't save the ratings. Everything SDS does list for those three updates is counted in this post. Only the ratings it never lists are missing for them, and we don't have that data anywhere. Since August 20 we save every Live Series card's ratings whenever they change, so every update from here on should be checkable in full.

One more thing, because you'd find it anyway. Our own roster history pages try to fill this gap with rating changes we worked out ourselves, and when I checked them against the real card data, about half were changes that never happened, and many of the rest had the wrong number. Our pages don't yet mark which changes we inferred, so until that's fixed, check a card against SDS's own update page.

Bryce Harper on October 2 is what that looks like. SDS listed one change for him: arm strength, 67 to 84. Our page also shows contact and power against lefties each jumping 20 points. Our card data says neither moved, and his card on SDS's site shows 56 and 61 for them today, not 62 and 67.

Our own October 2 page for Bryce Harper. The arm change is real and SDS listed it. The two +20s are ones we inferred, and they never happened.

The rating history on our card pages has the same problem: it mixes SDS's list with the changes we inferred, and doesn't mark which is which. Bryce Harper's card shows the same two +20s. Showing every real change, marked when SDS didn't list it, is what we're fixing.

The other nineteen

The 19 small updates changed 14 to 39 cards each, 464 in total, and 86% of those were pitchers. They also carried most of the season's position changes (534 of 776) and new cards (409 of 504). Their OVR changes ran 174 up and 33 down.

If you're watching for rating moves, the six big updates are the ones that count.

What this means for you

• Watch power for hitters, and H/9 and pitching clutch for pitchers. Those moved the overall most among the ratings you can see. BB/9 counts as much, but SDS's card pages don't show it. Plate Discipline and HR/9 move a lot and barely count.
• Expect a point or two. That's the typical move. A move of five or more happened 414 times all season, up or down, across the whole Live set.
• Diamonds that move usually go down. This season they went down more often than up, and never up by more than four in an update.
• Read the split you play against. The left and right lines move on their own.
• SDS's update list isn't the whole update. Check the card afterwards, especially a pitcher's H/9 against lefties.

Source: SDS's own roster update data for all 26 updates, March 27 to October 2, 2026, checked against our database, our public roster history and SDS's update pages. We only started saving card ratings in late July, so the unlisted-ratings figures cover August 14, September 11 and October 2.

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