Auction & FA Trackers: 2021 Year-In-Review

4 Auctions and 6 FA sets a day! Join me on a deep dive of some insights from that data! Posted: Jan 16 '22

I started the Companion Free Agent Tracker in August 2020 and the Companion Auction Tracker in December 2020. Since 2021 was the first full year of tracking for both, I decided to do a deep-dive into the data I logged to help the community better understand how these game features work.

Below you'll find some of the most interesting facts and numbers from my analysis. I hope you find it useful!

The data below is limited to the North American server. Some/all of my analysis may not be valid for other servers.

Why and How I Track Data

A Brief History of the FA and Auction Trackers

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).

How I Track FA and Auctions

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.

Keeping the trackers up-to-date is one of the largest time-investments I make for the Companion. You can help support me in this endeavor by joining me on Patreon! You'll even get some exclusive benefits!

FAQs

Will you ever start tracking for other servers? Maybe! I've had a few folks offer to input data for the Asian server. I'm not opposed to the idea, but it would take a not-insignificant amount of work to build that functionality. I have to weigh the benefit of gathering that data with the cost of not being able to build something else.
I'm interested in helping to track data. How can I help? I appreciate that! Right now, I don't have the functionality to allow other people to log data, but maybe some day in the future.
Why not just post FA / Auction screenshots?

That would certainly speed things up wouldn't it?

Unfortunately, the Companion will likely never feature in-game screenshots, especially those showing MLB player photos or team logos. I don't want to infringe on Com2Us copyrights, and the MLB/MLBPA are bears I do not want to poke.

You seriously track all of these manually? Do you ever sleep? No sleep til Brooklyn FA screenshots.
Can I have access to your complete data sets? No, I don't plan on releasing the full data sets. That said, if you have any questions about this data-dive or suggestions for improvements or other aspects I should discuss, feel free to reach out via my Contact Me Form and I'll see what I can do.

Auction

High-Level Overview

Let's start with some basic numbers. There are 4 Star auctions a day, each with 6 players (3 from the AL and 3 from the NL). I don't track Point auctions. 4 * 365 = 1,460 auctions to track in 2021 and I am proud to say that I tracked every single one of them! That's 8,760 players tracked. Special shoutout to OuterSunset for helping me track auction results when I couldn't get to them.

I track three data points for each auction slot: the player for sale, the winning bid, and the winning team (i.e. game user). Let's dive into stats for each of those data points.

Auction Player Data

By Team

The average number of players per team was 292. ATL had the most players appear at 313 while MIA had the fewest at 264. That's a 49-player gap between the outliers, but three-quarters of teams sat within 20 players of each other (between 280 and 300), which seems reasonable.

By Position

I tracked 4,727 position players and 4,018 pitchers, or roughly a 54-46 split. The chart below shows the breakdown by position:

This chart roughly aligns with the general makeup of the player pool. Basically, this means that player-position does not seem to be a factor in which cards appear in the auction.

Looking at all available players, the batter-pitcher split much closer to exactly 50-50. There are nearly as many RPs as SPs in the general pool, but you can see that RPs appear significantly less often than SPs in the auction. I'm not sure why that is.

Base OVR

Note: This Base OVR analysis omits all 2021 cards that were recorded during the Live season. It is important to do this because I don't track player OVR changes during the Live season, so the OVR that those cards have in the Registry now does not reflect the OVR they had when they were recorded.

One of the biggest benefits of tracking auctions so thoroughly is it allows us to better understand the types of players we can acquire.

Here are the high-level takeaways:

Lowest OVR
52.8 OVR (1 card)
  • Z.Collins'20 (CWS), sold for 5,555 to ChiSoxMS
Highest OVR
74.0 OVR (2 cards)
  • A.Wainwright'14 (STL), sold for 27,329 to DJO414
  • A.Wainwright'13 (STL), sold for 21,123 to TANSTAAFL

The majority of players (5,924 / 7947) were between Base 65 and Base 71. At first, I thought this was because of the high number of SPs; in the Registry you'll find a lot of mediocre SPs sitting between 68 and 71 OVR. But, when I excluded SPs, the majority-range stayed nearly the same, dropping just one OVR to 64 - 70.

Winning Bid & Team Data

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 .

Top 3 Winningest Teams (game users)

Surprise surprise, the top 3 are all players who are suspected bots (suspicious buyers).

Game User # Wins Avg. Bid
NYY#00002b4h3z 30 12,826
ClCubs2016 22 32,753
CHCGrizzly630 20 17,057
I've included links to the blog posts I made for NYY#00002b4h3z and ClCubs2016. You can see every auction they won. I also wrote this post exploring why the hell anybody would bid like these accounts do.

Excluding those suspicious buyers, the top 3 were much more reasonable spenders:

Game User # Wins Avg. Bid
HamptonBrewers 18 6,556
CWS#00002afcvk 17 9,559
WiffleBallerz 15 (tied) 4,109
405OKRANGERS 15 (tied) 6,174

Top 3 In Stars Spent

Winning the most players isn't the only way to win the Auction Year-In-Review. You can also be a big spender! Here are the top three spenders. Congrats to CWS#00002afcvk for making both lists.

Game User # Wins Avg. Bid
Stropsdopes 10 187,217
BOS#000029e83y 10 171,001
CWS#00002afcvk 17 162,500

Miscellaneous

Here are some extra facts about Auction spending habits in 2021.

3 or fewer 4 or more
# of teams 4,600 teams 450+ teams
Avg Stars Spent 7,707 8,307 ( 8,221 excluding the bots)
Total Stars Spent 10,603 48,764 ( 45,809 excluding the bots)

31 cards went Unsold, but I question whether any of those were legitimately unsold. In early July there was a bug that caused four auctions to go completely unsold. One auction in October suffered the same fate during the time the game was down after the Great Diamond Pack Heist. The remaining two unsold cards appeared in the same auction in April, which seems likely to be a game bug or unexpected game maintenance as well.

Summary of Takeaways

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

Free Agents

High-Level Overview

For Free Agents, I track the player and the GI. There are 6 FA sets a day with 3 players each (random from AL and NL). That means there are 2,190 FA sets a year. Of those, I tracked 2,150, or 98%!

FA Player Data

By Team

The average number of cards per team was 215. FA counts were grouped slightly closer than Auction counts, with 26 teams (~86%) having between 209 and 223 cards appear. The outliers were TOR (233 cards) and CWS / COL (204 cards each).

By Position

Interestingly, I tracked more pitchers than position players in FA (opposite the ratio we see in auctions). There were 3040 position players to 3409 pitchers. One player that appeared does not have a position in the Registry.

Similar to Auctions, SPs made up the largest percentage of tracked players - 1,856 cards or over a quarter of the total! RPs were next with 1,227 cards. SS was the most common batter position with 423 appearances.

Base OVR

Note: This Base OVR analysis omits all 2021 cards that were recorded during the Live season. It is important to do this because I don't track player OVR changes during the Live season, so the OVR that those cards have in the Registry now does not reflect the OVR they had when they were recorded.

Here's the breakdown of FAs by Base OVR.

It's well-known that FA has an upper-limit for base OVR. Based on my data, it appears the upper limits are:

  • Pitcher (SP): 72.2 (2 cards)
  • Pitcher (RP/CP): 71.0 (1 card)
  • Batters (any pos): 70.8 (70 cards)

Let's break down the data for these three groups. If you're doing the math along with me, please note that since we omitted 2021 cards that appeared during the Live season, the total counts per group are now: 1,707 SPs, 1,381 relievers, and 2,774 batters.

Starting Pitchers

Nearly three-quarters of starting pitchers fell between 67.4 and 71.6 Base OVR (1,247 SPs, or 73.1%). Only 21 came in above that range, and 439 below.

The lowest SP OVR was 60.0, appearing once, belonging to J.Zimmermann'20 (DET).

Given the increasing number of high OVR (73+) SPs available in the game, it's disappointing to see how few useful SPs appear in FA, especially given that they make up such a large slice of the total number of FAs. The 72.2 OVR ceiling hampers our chances greatly. Only 36 SPs that appeared had an aOVR of 73.0 or greater.

Relievers

Close to two-thirds of relievers (RP and CP) fell between 64.0 and 67.4 OVR (890, or 64.4%).

Three relievers with base OVRs lower than 60.0 appeared in 2021, with OVRs of 59.6, 59.4, and 57.8.

There were just 25 relievers at or above base 69.0, which is what I'd consider an elite reliever. It's nice to see elite relievers can appear, but they are few and far between. Only one appeared at the max of 71.0 (C.Carrasco'14 (CLE)), and just four at the next lowest step of 70.0 (all of them T.Antone'20 (CIN)).

But can I actually pull an elite reliever? To put this in perspective, let's look at the odds of getting a specific elite reliever.

There are currently 47 available RP/CPs between 69.0 and 71.0 OVR. To get the odds of a specific card from that group (say, S.Doolittle'14) appearing in FA, we multiply the odds of elite relievers that appear in FA by the odds that our specific choice is the card that appears:

(25 / 5862) * (1 / 47) = 0.009%

That's only 4x better than the odds of pulling a Legend from a Silver pack...

So you're telling me there's a chance...
Lloyd
Batters

Nearly three-quarters of batters (2,211 or 79.7% of batters) fell between 65.0 and 70.8 OVR.

776 (28.0% of batters, 13.2% of all FAs) were at or above 69.0 base OVR. This was much higher than I expected. Typically, position players in this range are likely to be endgame position players, so it's great to see that we have a decent chance of pulling them from FA.

The lowest batter OVR was 58.0, appearing 16 times with 16 different players.

GI Data

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.

Best Times To Get FAs

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.

FA Set Time <= 65 66 - 69 >= 70
12 AM 12 731 265
4 AM 20 703 234
8 AM 935 3 0
12 PM 442 545 0
4 PM 427 552 0
8 PM 15 668 290

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.

Note: I did this same time-based analysis for Auction and did not see similar results. Better cards do not seem to appear at any particular auction time slot.

My FA

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.

Summary of Takeaways

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.

Thank you!

Thanks for reading and thanks for coming to my site!

It took a ton of effort to collect all of this data and even more to parse through it and create this analysis. I hope you find it useful when making decisions in the game. If you have any questions about this data-dive or suggestions for improvements or other aspects I should discuss, feel free to reach out via my Contact Me Form!

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