What it is
The game’s own overall, rebuilt from the attributes on the card and left uncapped. Same scale as OVR, no ceiling.
See the board
Pulse Rating
Twenty cards read 99. They are not the same card.
The game stops counting at 99, so its best cards all print the same number and you cannot tell them apart. Pulse Rating is the game’s own rating recipe, recovered from the whole catalog and left uncapped — so those cards separate.
What the game prints
What Pulse Rating separates them into
One number, one question
Pulse Rating answers “how good is this card” and nothing else. Every other question on this site gets its own number, because fusing them is what makes a rating unreadable.
What it is not
Not a price and not a deal. Nothing about stubs, scarcity or the market touches this number. Not a meta score either — no attribute is re-weighted to suit how the game is played online.
What it can’t see
It reproduces the game’s rating faithfully, which means it inherits the game’s blind spots. More on that at the bottom of this page.
What a rating is made of
Nothing is hidden inside the number. Pick any card on any board and it comes apart into the attributes that built it — this is the highest-rated card in the game right now, taken apart.
Baseline, plus every attributeweight × rating on the card
—Pulse Rating
The weights, in full
These are the numbers. Every attribute on a card is multiplied by its weight and added to a baseline — that is the whole calculation, and it is the same arithmetic the breakdown above is doing.
The two we threw away
Two attributes fitted with a negative weight: catcher blocking, and pitch control. Taken at face value they would mean that a better blocking catcher rates lower, and that better control lowers a pitcher’s rating.
That is not a finding — it is an artifact of how tightly those attributes track ones already in the model. Blocking moves with pop time; control moves with BB/9. The fit had no way to separate them, so it handed the credit to one and took it back from the other.
We could have kept them. The model would have been slightly more accurate, and it would have printed something indefensible. We dropped both and refitted, and took the accuracy loss.
How we know it’s right
Why position rank exists
The game’s OVR is very nearly position-blind. Averaged across all eight hitter positions, the spread is under a single point — a 90 at catcher and a 90 at first base print the same number for very different cards.
Rather than put a thumb on the scale inside Pulse Rating, we report the answer separately. Position rank tells you where a card sits among everyone who plays its spot, so a strong catcher stops being buried under a wall of corner bats.
Known limits
Pulse Rating reproduces the game’s rating faithfully, which means it inherits the game’s blind spots. Quirks, pitch arsenal shape, swing animation and how a card actually feels in your hands are not in the game’s overall, so they are not in this number either.
It is a measure of what a card is, not of how it plays. Those are different questions, and the second one deserves its own number rather than a fudge factor bolted onto this one.
Every weight on this page is read live from the published model file. If you want to check the arithmetic yourself, it is a plain, commented JavaScript file — no build step, no minification.
View the model sourceWhere this number shows up