Methodology

Card attributes, series, and prices originate from MLB The Show's own card database and Community Market. DiamondOps ingests that data, normalizes it, and stores a rolling history so it can show you trends rather than just a single snapshot.

Everything you see is derived from that public market and card data — prices are real marketplace numbers, not estimates.

Market prices refresh on a tiered cadence. Free and Lite see market listings on a roughly 5-minute refresh and trending on a 30-minute one; Pro and Diamond get 60-second listings and 5-minutetrending. Card attributes and series data update whenever the game's roster updates and content drops change them.

Flips are the exception: every signed-in account gets the full flip board on the same 60-second refresh, free tier included — along with the sales-velocity columns (Volume/hr, Profit/hr, Profit/Min) computed from real completed orders. There is no free-tier delay and no row cap on that page. What Pro adds there is Value Gap and Buy Signal, not fresher or deeper flips.

Throughout the app, timestamps show when a given number was last updated so you always know how current the view is.

A card's in-game Overall is one number for the whole card, weighted in a way SDS has never published — and it does not change with the difficulty you play on. OpScore re-weights the attributes that actually determine in-game performance — contact and power against both hands, plate vision and discipline, speed and fielding for hitters; arsenal quality, velocity, movement, and control for pitchers.

Critically, OpScore is computed separately for each difficulty (All-Star, Hall of Fame, Legend), because the same card plays differently as the PCI shrinks and pitch speeds rise. Cards with game-impacting quirks receive an uplift, since they perform better than their raw attributes suggest. The exact attribute weights are calibrated against competitive gameplay and tuned each year; the precise formula is proprietary. The full explainer lives on the OpScore page.

• Flips are ranked by profit afterthe game's 10% market tax, not the raw spread. ROI expresses that profit relative to buy price so cheap and expensive flips compare fairly.
• Anomalies flag a card whose price has moved sharply outside its recent rolling average — a candidate worth a look, whether driven by real demand, a roster update, or manipulation.
• Bot riskestimates how likely a card's recent movement is driven by automated trading rather than genuine player demand, so a manufactured rally is easy to spot.
• Best time to buy / sell windows come from aggregating price by hour across recent history to surface the cheapest and most expensive parts of the day.

See the glossary for plain-English definitions of any term here.

DiamondOps reads the market; it does not control it. Signals describe what has happened and what is statistically likely — they are not guarantees. Prices move on real-world performance, content drops, and player behavior that no model fully predicts. Treat OpScore and market signals as a sharper starting point for your own judgment, not a crystal ball.