Auction & FA Trackers: 2021 Year-In-Review

I started tracking FAs in August 2020. I wanted a definitive answer to the question "What's the best card I can get in FA?" (see the answer below).

The FA Tracker actually became the foundation for the Companion Player Registry . I was logging the names of the players, so why not also log their position, stats, and GI? A large portion of the stats in the Registry have come from my FA tracking.

I created the Auction Tracker to follow a different problem. Throughout 2020, I noticed a single player winning a large number of auctions with the exact same bid over and over (Sea_Sluggers, 50k stars). I decided to start tracking auction winners to see if I could spot trends for Sea_Sluggers, and maybe also spot some other malicious bidders.

Ironically, as soon as I started tracking (and before publishing the tracker), Sea_Sluggers disappeared from the auction. I haven't logged a single win from them, but I have spotted some other malicious users (more on them later).

All of my tracking is done manually. Yes. I literally type in each free agent / auction winner. Typically I screenshot FAs and Auction results in between League farming, and then input them when I have 15 minutes at my desktop.

This is obviously not an ideal system. It's not fast (I usually only log them once or twice a day) and it's 100% dependent on me opening up the game at least 6 times a day. It also means I can only track the cards I see on my server. The data below is limited to the North American server. Some/all of my analysis may not be valid for other servers. For example, I know for a fact that the Asian server has a lower FA OVR limit that the North American one. My data does not capture that.

The benefit to doing everything manually is that I can be reasonably sure it is accurate. I do make mistakes, but I make a point of checking my work before saving to try to ensure the data is good. Because of that, I feel confident in my analysis below.

I tracked all winning bids and nearly all winning teams (game users) in 2021 (27 winners had team names with characters I couldn't type out so I recorded the team as blank).

The highest winning bid was 57,000 by jarmo for W.Buehler'21 (LAD). This occurred during the Live season. Congrats on the gamble, jarmo!

Five cards sold for the minimum: 1,000 .

The tl;dr:

• There doesn't seem to be a bias towards or against any particular team.
• There doesn't seem to be a bias towards or against any particular position, except for RPs, which appear about half as often as I'd expect. Otherwise, cards seem to appear relative to the general makeup of the available card pool.
• There appears to be an OVR ceiling of 74.0, but likely no OVR floor.
• Cards with Base OVRs between 65 and 71 are most likely to appear.
• If you're looking to win a good card, be prepared to spend upwards of 10,000

In addition to tracking the players, I also do my best to track GIs for all FAs. Of the 6,450 cards I tracked, I managed to log GIs for 6,106 of them (94.6%). GIs ranged from +61 to +69, with most cards (~70%) having a GI between +63 and +67.

The takeaway here? If you get a card from FA, you're gonna need some GI Resets for them.

Fun fact: I originally tracked the individual GI boosts for each stat for every card. I logged about 1,500 cards like this until I was given the formula for calculating the GI (thanks again, ColdSlawter!). I used these logged GIs to confirm that the GI generator in the Sandbox was 100% accurate.

The last data point I wanted to explore was whether the time of appearance affected the types of FAs we can acquire. The answer is a resounding yes.

The best times to get FAs are 12AM, 4AM, and 8PM (Eastern/server-time).

It's a little difficult to cleanly demonstrate this in a graphic, so I decided to include a table of the data below. Each row represents a time of appearance, and each column represents the number of players that appeared grouped by base OVR.

Looking at the "">=70 OVR" column you can see that no players were logged during the day. None. Meanwhile, the bulk of the "<=65" group fills that daytime void.

I wondered if this massive discrepancy was caused by certain positions appearing more at one time or another (such as more SPs at night) but that does not appear to be the case. If we remove SPs from this table, the ratios remain roughly the same. Some positions do roughly align with time slots (catchers are significantly more likely to appear at 8 AM, for instance) but those seem to be caused by tendencies in the overall card pool, as opposed to FA tendencies (there are a lot of crappy catcher cards).

So the takeaway is that if you want better cards, you better be a night owl. No sleep til Brooklyn good FA cards.

I haven't personally been tracking the cards that appear in My FA. I screenshotted them for the first week or so, but they looked generally within the bounds of normal FA (in terms of base OVR, etc.), so I stopped tracking them.

If anyone else has hard data on this, I'd love to see it.

The tl;dr:

• There doesn't seem to be a bias towards or against any particular team.
• There doesn't seem to be a bias towards or against any particular position, except for RPs, which appear about half as often as I'd expect. Otherwise, cards seem to appear relative to the general makeup of the available card pool.
• There appear to be three OVR ceilings, based on position:
  • Pitcher (SP): 72.2
  • Pitcher (RP/CP): 71.0
  • Batters (any pos): 70.8
• It's unlikely you'll get an endgame SP from FA, but you may get a decent one if you're still building your rotation.
• It's technically possible to get an endgame RP/CP from FA, but incredibly unlikely.
• It's very possible to get an endgame position player from FA.
• FA grade increases are limited to between +61 and +69, with most having somewhere between +63 and +67. Get those GI Resets ready!
• The best time to get a FA is 12AM, 4AM, or 8PM. No sleep til Brooklyn good FA cards.

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