MLB The Show 21: Live Series Card Updates

Context

San Diego Studios (SDS), the developer behind the video game MLB The Show 21, has done something interesting with their "ultimate team" competitor called Diamond Dynasty. They have a series of cards called the Live Series (LS), where players' in-game attributes will be adjusted via roster updates in accordance with their real-life performance. Since SDS publishes these via their well-documented public APIs, I thought it would be fit to pull in the data for any kind of analytics the community could dream up.

Content

SDS generally updates their rosters every 2-3 weeks, depending on what their other in-game content schedule and real-life MLB schedules allow for. There are two key files of interest:

1. live_series.csv details the current manifest of all LS player cards and their attributes.
2. deltas.csv details the per-update "deltas" that resulted in attribute changes.

These two can be combined with other datasets to do trend analysis, forecast which cards will rise or drop in value, and so on.

Acknowledgements

SDS, thank you for exposing this data via public API and documenting it so well!

Inspiration

I wanted to source this dataset to explore questions such as:

• How does SDS use real-life statistics to model in-game performance?
• What players are due for an increase or decrease in the next roster update?