Notes from the Headghoul on the Diamond Dynasty market.
I went through every roster update SDS shipped for MLB The Show 26, card by card, to find out which ratings actually move an overall. Most OVR moves are tiny, power drives hitters, and two of the biggest drivers for pitchers aren't in SDS's update list.
Picked by the Diamond Radar score showing on the day you'd actually have bought, cards scored 70 or better returned a typical +333 per 1,000 stubs bought a week before a roster update, against +62 bought the night before. And flipping them before the update lands gives almost all of that back.
On October 2, cards with a Diamond Radar score of 90 or better upgraded 39 times out of 41, and the top ten of the board went ten for ten. And the players who weren't playing, one of them left on the board on purpose, showed exactly what the model needs to learn next.
Across all five roster updates we graded this season, cards with a Diamond Radar score of 90 or better upgraded 78% of the time and averaged the best result on the board. They also produced the most expensive misses on the board. Both of those are true, and the reason is the week before the update.
63 of the 77 cards that crossed a rarity line on September 11 had a Radar score of 50 or higher, and all four +8 jumps scored 83 or better. Nick Kurtz scored a 96 from the 60-day injured list and didn't move an inch. The lesson: a score is a chance, not a promise.
29 million completed sales say there's a best hour to buy and a best hour to sell — and that it only pays on cards you'd never bother timing.
Our July upgrade-week board went 16-for-20 — every high-confidence call hit, 10 for 10, and the top pick returned +552% in under a week. And every prediction the model makes is now graded in public: 619 calls, 64.8% precision, on a track record anyone can audit.
For weeks, perfect swings against Josh Hader's two-seam and Michael King's sinker died in the outfield. Game Update 13 quietly rewrites both deliveries. Here's what was actually broken.
A postmortem of the June 12 roster update: every best call, every whiff, and the pattern hiding in both.