True Overall™ and Meta Overall Explained: How They Work and Every Update
What are True Overall™ and Meta Overall?
Anyone who plays Diamond Dynasty learns it fast: not all 99s are created equal. The in-game overall caps at 99 and doesn't care which attributes matter at a card's position, so two cards that both show 99 can play completely differently.
ShowZone built two rating systems to fix that, and they answer two different questions:
- True Overall™: how good is this card, really? It recalculates a card's overall by weighting each attribute by what actually matters for its position (H/9 and K/9 for pitchers, Contact and Power for hitters), and it isn't capped at 99.
- Meta Overall: how good is this card in the current competitive meta? It builds on True Overall™ and factors in gameplay mechanics, the current Ranked Seasons difficulty and the attributes that win games online.
The short version: use True Overall™ to see a card's real value beyond the 99 cap, especially for offline modes like Conquest, Mini Seasons and Showdowns. Use Meta Overall to build your lineup for Ranked Seasons, Events and Battle Royale.
True Overall™
True Overall™ started in 2020 as a set of simple regression models. Today it's a deep neural network, an AI model trained on thousands of real cards. It learns how much each attribute contributes to a card's rating at each position, then applies that without the 99 cap.
That's why it can spot an elite card hiding behind its displayed overall. A card that shows as a 92 but has 125s in its key hitting attributes will score like the elite card it really is.
We retrain True Overall™ every month on the current card pool, so it understands each new wave of cards right away. We only switch to a new version when it's more accurate than the one it replaces. The current version predicts card ratings to within about three-quarters of a point on average, measured on cards it never saw during training.
Meta Overall
Meta Overall launched in 2022 to answer a different question: how good is this card in-game, right now? It rewards what actually wins games:
- Power and speed for hitters
- Real swing-and-miss, a deep pitch mix and genuinely nasty individual pitches for pitchers
- Quirks, pitch speed gaps and switch hitting
- Two-way value, for pitchers who can also hit
- Tunneling pitch combos, like a sinker paired with a cutter
- Defense where it matters, including the secondary positions a card can actually play
How Meta Overall is tuned
Since May 2026, Meta Overall has been tuned against the community's own tier lists instead of by hand. Every month we add the newest tier lists (nearly 190 so far this season), and the model adjusts its weights until its rankings line up with how players actually rank cards.
A few guardrails keep it honest:
- Recent lists count more. A launch-week ranking was right for launch week, but the meta moves. Newer tier lists carry more weight, and older cards settle wherever the current meta puts them.
- Narrow lists stay narrow. A tier list that only ranks one card series teaches the model which of those cards is better, not where they sit against everything else.
- The scale is anchored to history. New cards are measured on the same scale as the best cards from past years, so a fresh 99 can't leapfrog the all-time greats just because it's new.
- Relievers stay in their lane. Elite closers are valued highly but kept below the best starting pitchers.
Meta Overall+
Meta Overall+ works like OPS+ in real baseball. It shows how a card's Meta Overall compares to the average card at its position. A Meta Overall+ of 100 is exactly average, above 100 is better than average, and below 100 is worse.
Monthly tuning
In May 2026 we committed to refreshing both ratings every month instead of a few times a year, so they keep pace with the game. Each month we:
- Add the newest community tier lists and every new card.
- Re-tune Meta Overall against those tier lists.
- Retrain True Overall™ on the current card pool, and switch versions only if the new one is more accurate.
- Recalculate every card and check the results against the all-time scale.
Each month's changes are posted in the update history below.
Update history
2026 (MLB The Show 26)
- October 2026: Steady Meta, Sharper True Overall: Meta Overall re-tuned against 189 community tier lists with only small hitter-side changes, and True Overall™ retrained into its most accurate version yet.
- September 2026: Calibrating for the 99 Wave: recalibrated the all-time scale so the flood of new 99s is rated fairly against past greats, and reined in elite closers.
- Summer 2026: Sharper Than Ever: rebuilt Meta Overall on every community tier list of the season, weighted newer lists more heavily, corrected overrated finesse pitchers and relievers, and gave secondary positions proper weight.
- May 2026: A Major Refresh: moved both ratings to monthly refreshes, switched Meta Overall from hand-tuning to tuning against creator tier lists, and made True Overall™ more accurate, especially for 80 to 90 overall cards.
2025 (MLB The Show 25)
- 2025 True Overall™ & Meta Overall Updates: swings started to matter, dominant pitchers got a boost, fielding and clutch were weighted more heavily, pitch quality began to count over quantity, and Meta Overall+ was introduced.
- Meta Overall Update #3: Pitch Arsenal and Hitter Balance
- Meta Overall Update #2: Hitting