It's been a little over a month since MLB The Show 26 dropped, and we've spent that time rebuilding how both True Overall™ and Meta Overall get tuned. The May 2026 update is the first big update under that new system, and it's also the start of something new: from here on out, both ratings get refreshed every month. New cards drop, the meta evolves, top players figure out what works. The ratings should keep up.
This is a hybrid update. We didn't change the fundamentals of either calculation. What changed is how we tune them. Both got refreshed under data-driven systems, and the result is a meaningful accuracy bump on True Overall and a recalibrated Meta Overall that better matches how the community actually ranks cards.
Here's the rundown.
Executive Summary
- True Overall™ is more accurate this month. The model retrained on the latest pool of cards, and predictions are noticeably tighter than they were in April. Mid-range cards (in the 60 to 90 overall range) saw the biggest accuracy gains, with the 80 to 90 bucket cutting its average error nearly in half.
- Meta Overall got a brand new tuning system. Instead of hand-tuning weights one at a time (which is how we've always done it), Meta Overall now gets tuned against a set of community tier lists from popular and highly skilled content creators. The system mathematically adjusts the model to match how those creators rank cards.
- Pitcher Meta Overalls shifted the most. BB/9 & Control no longer double-counts against pitchers, Stamina now properly separates starters from relievers, reliever Control got a big boost, and pitch arsenal mechanics got rebalanced.
- Hitter shifts are subtler. Most cards moved by less than 2 Meta Overall points either way. The bigger story is position-specific philosophy changes (CF leans more toward offense now, SS leans more on the bat than the glove).
- Felix Hernandez got a major correction. The lone 99 SP in MLB 26 was sitting at a Meta Overall of 85 under the old weights. After the retune, he lands at 105, where a 99 SP should be.
- New cadence: both calculations refresh every month going forward.
What "Monthly" Actually Means
Up until now, both Meta Overall and True Overall got updated whenever we had time. Meta Overall in particular had been hand-tuned in small increments over the years, with the community gradually validating the results. That worked, but it doesn't keep up with the pace of the game. New content drops every couple of weeks. Supercharged cards rotate in and out. The meta shifts as players figure out what's actually good.
So we built systems to refresh both calculations on a fixed monthly schedule. The short version:
- True Overall retrains on the latest pool of cards each month. More data, more recent content, better predictions.
- Meta Overall re-runs the new tuning system against a fresh set of tier lists. As content creators update their rankings and new cards land, the model adjusts to match.
Both ratings remain independent. True Overall still answers "what should this card's overall be from raw stats alone?" and Meta Overall still answers "how good is this card for actual competitive play?" Updating one doesn't affect the other.
Meta Overall: How the New Tuning System Works
The biggest behind-the-scenes change is that Meta Overall is no longer hand-tuned. We now feed the calculation a set of tier lists curated by popular and highly skilled content creators in the community, and the system mathematically adjusts the underlying weights to make the computed Meta Overalls match those tier lists as closely as possible.
For this run, we used nearly a dozen tier lists covering catcher, corner infielders, shortstop, outfield, SP, RP/CP, and a few all-position tier lists. Many cards show up in multiple content creator lists, which gives the system a strong consensus signal about where each card actually belongs.
The system balances three things at once:
- Does the card land in the right tier? (S, A, B, C, D, or F)
- Within that tier, is it ranked correctly against the other cards in it?
- Is the actual Meta Overall number in a sensible range for that tier?
The tuning system adjusts a lot of dials at once: per-position attribute weights, position-specific intercepts, and a bunch of calculation knobs that used to be hardcoded. After this run, cards land in their target tier noticeably more often than they did before. Not perfect, but a real step forward.
A few things we deliberately preserved:
Higher attributes always make a card better, never worse. We constrain every attribute weight so that increasing an attribute (like Arm Strength) can never lower a card's Meta Overall. Cards get elevated through boost mechanics (Quirks, swing tags, pitcher tags, fielding tiers, Clutch tiers), not by punishing weak attributes.
Legends stay where they should. Before the tuning even starts, we save a snapshot of the existing Meta Overall scaling for elite cards (95 overall and up). That snapshot acts as a soft anchor during tuning, so cards like Awards Pedro Martinez from MLB The Show 25 and Milestone Mike Trout from MLB The Show 25 don't drift just because the system is trying to match modern tier lists that don't include them.
Time-correctness. Tier lists were saved on specific dates. The tuner only considers cards that existed when that tier list was created. That keeps newer content from getting unfairly penalized by tier lists that never had a chance to include it.
What Actually Changed: Pitchers (Biggest Shifts)
Pitcher Meta Overalls moved the most, and most of those moves correct things the old weights were getting wrong.
BB/9 no longer double-counts. Walks were already getting captured through the Control attribute (since Control is heavily based on real-life walk rate). Counting BB/9 separately on top of that was suppressing pitchers with average control but otherwise great stuff. We zeroed it out for both starters and relievers.
Starters value Stamina, Break, and Pitching Clutch a lot more. Stamina weight more than doubled, Break weight roughly tripled, Pitching Clutch and K/9 both jumped meaningfully. Fielding and Reaction time now factor in for starters too (stopping all of those comebackers is critical). The result: starters who actually carry a workload and pitch well into games rank higher, while gimmicky low-stamina starter cards lose some ground.
Relievers got the biggest Control boost. Control weight for relievers jumped to roughly 3.5x what it was before. K/9 and Pitching Clutch also climbed. The system is saying that the best relievers in the meta are the ones who can locate elite stuff in short bursts, and the old weights weren't capturing that.
Pitch arsenal mechanics got rebalanced. The reward for having 5 pitches increased significantly. The penalty for only having 3 pitches is gone. The bonus for tunneling pitch combos got a small bump. The "good pitch" curve also got steeper, so the gap between a card with 2 good pitches and one with 4 good pitches widens.
Tagged-card boosts softened. Meta Pitchers (the ones the community has flagged as unhittable) still get a boost, just not as big a boost as before. Same on the hitting side: Bad Swing penalties got softened by a meaningful margin. The system is telling us those tag adjustments were swinging things too hard relative to the rest of the model. The tags still matter, they just don't dominate the way they used to.
What Actually Changed: Hitters (Subtler Shifts)
Most hitters moved by less than 2 Meta Overall points either way. The bigger story here is philosophy: position-specific weights got more thoughtful.
A few highlights:
- First base: Speed weight zeroed out (1B doesn't run as much), Power vs R came down slightly, Hitting Durability now matters, Baserunning got a small bump. Net effect: 1B is now properly evaluated on power and contact rather than getting credit for speed numbers that don't show up in real games.
- Third base: Power vs L came down a bit, Hitting Durability now factors in. More balanced toward contact.
- Shortstop: Fielding reduced, with Contact vs L going up to compensate. Surprising at first, but it reflects what the tier lists are telling us: the community ranks SS more on the bat than the glove than the old weights implied.
- Center field: notable pivot toward offense. Contact vs R up, Arm Accuracy up, but Fielding halved and Arm Strength dropped a lot. CFs are now getting evaluated more on what they do at the plate.
- LF / RF: Baserunning up significantly for both, RF especially.
- Catcher: Arm Strength up. Mostly preserved otherwise.
Fielding and Clutch thresholds also got tweaked. The Diamond fielding boost came down a hair, but the Gold fielding cutoff was lowered, so more cards now qualify for the Gold-tier defensive boost. The High Clutch boost went up slightly. The Low Clutch cutoff was lowered, so fewer cards get penalized for having middling Clutch.
Quirks got recalibrated too. Each pitcher Quirk now contributes a bit more to the final Meta Overall. On the hitting side, the curve got smoothed out for cards loaded with Quirks, so the difference between a 3-Quirk hitter and a 6-Quirk hitter is a little less dramatic than before.
The Felix Hernandez Story
This one's worth its own section. We noticed Awards Felix Hernandez, the lone 99 overall starting pitcher in MLB The Show 26, wasn't quite getting the love he should. Under the old weights he was sitting at a Meta Overall of about 85. That's the kind of number we noticed and went, "yeah, that's not right."
For context: most 99 overall starters historically land in the mid-90s or higher on Meta Overall. His closest analogs (25 Awards Pedro Martinez, 22 Milestone Randy Johnson, 25 Milestone Roger Clemens) all sit comfortably above 115. King Felix at 85 was clearly a calibration issue, not a real assessment of how the card plays. His attribute profile was getting punished in ways the old hand-tuned weights weren't equipped to handle.
So we went back to the drawing board, retuned everything, and made sure the system handles his profile properly now that things have settled into the 26 meta. After the retune, Felix lands at 105. That's still a touch lower than the deeper legend analogs at 99, which is honestly fair given the differences in their stat profiles, but it's a far more sensible number that finally gives him the love he deserves. If you've been holding off on Felix because the Meta Overall was throwing you off, now's a great time to take another look at how he fits in your rotation.
True Overall: What Changed This Month
True Overall is a separate calculation from Meta Overall. Where Meta Overall scores how good a card is for competitive play, True Overall is a prediction model that estimates what a card's overall should be based purely on its raw stats. A True Overall higher than the displayed overall means the card is underrated. Lower means overrated. It's one of the strongest signals for spotting hidden gems.
We retrain True Overall every month now too. This month's version was trained on the latest pool of cards in the game, with all the new content drops from the past month included.
Bottom line: the model is meaningfully more accurate than last month, especially on cards in the 60 to 90 overall range. The 80 to 90 bucket in particular cut its average prediction error nearly in half. For most users that's a clear win, because most of the card pool lives in that range, and that's where most of you spend your evaluation time deciding which cards to pick up.
There's one tradeoff: at the very top of the distribution (90 to 99 overall), accuracy backed up slightly. Even so, predictions in that range are still well within a point of the actual overall on most cards. Not bad, but worth flagging.
One thing worth mentioning: supercharged cards are excluded from training. Cards like Chase Burns are temporarily sitting on supercharged stats that look like a much higher overall than their actual base. If we trained on those, the model would learn "high attributes equals low overall," which is the opposite of true. The filter has been part of the system since prior versions, but it's the kind of detail that matters in keeping the model accurate as content drops.
What's Next
A few things worth flagging about how this works going forward:
Both calculations refresh every month. The cadence is now baked in. That means True Overall predictions stay accurate as new card series release, and Meta Overall tier accuracy keeps improving as creators update their tier lists.
Every tuning run is auditable. We keep full before-and-after snapshots of every retune. If anything ever produces weird results, we can roll it back cleanly.
The system isn't done. This month's Meta Overall retune put more cards in the right tier than the old weights did, but we're not at 100%. Some positions, especially elite legend relievers, still drift a bit further than we'd like. We didn't include any tier lists with legend cards in this run, which is part of why some legends shift. Future tuning rounds with more tier lists will tighten this up.
True Overall and Meta Overall remain independent. Updating one doesn't touch the other. Use True Overall when you want to know what a card's overall should be from raw stats. Use Meta Overall when you want to know how it'll actually play in competitive games. They answer different questions, and they're both better this month than they were last month.
Wrap-Up
This is the biggest update we've shipped to either calculation in months, and it's also the first one shipped under a system designed to keep updating. The hand-tuning era was good. The data-driven era should be better, and it'll get measurably better every month as more tier lists feed in and more cards train into the model.
If you spot a card whose Meta Overall feels off, we want to hear about it. Drop into our Discord or reply to us on Twitter and call it out. The more signal we get, the better the next monthly retune will be.
Now go put together a lineup. Felix is finally rated like a 99 again.
FAQ's
Q: How often does ShowZone update True Overall and Meta Overall ratings?
A: Starting with the May 2026 update, both ratings refresh monthly. Previously they were updated on an as-needed basis. The monthly cadence gives both systems time to absorb new card releases, roster updates, and community feedback before recalibrating.
Q: What's the difference between True Overall and Meta Overall in MLB The Show 26?
A: True Overall measures a player's underlying skill ceiling by weighting attributes by their actual gameplay impact — independent of how players are used. Meta Overall reflects how the community ranks cards in practice, factoring in build viability, position scarcity, and meta archetypes. True Overall is "how good is this player"; Meta Overall is "how good is this card right now."
Q: Why did pitcher ratings shift so much in the May 2026 update?
A: The new tuning system gave more weight to pitch-shape attributes (break, velocity differential) and reduced the impact of attributes that don't translate to online play. Pitchers with elite specialty pitches saw the biggest jumps; pitchers leaning on raw velocity alone saw smaller bumps.
Q: Will my favorite cards drop in Meta Overall every month?
A: Possibly, but most movement is small. Meta Overall is a relative ranking — if new cards enter the player pool above an existing card, that card's Meta Overall ranking will compress. The underlying card hasn't gotten worse; the meta has gotten deeper.
Q: When is the next True Overall and Meta Overall update?
A: Around June 10, 2026 — roughly one month after the May refresh. We'll publish a new article each month walking through what changed and which cards saw the biggest movement.
