Sorare MLB Market Watch – 01.11.23
The offseason remains quiet, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t important developments to take note of.
5 Quick Hits
This week saw continued delivery on macro promises from the Sorare team - namely offseason utility and increased partnership traction in the States. In addition to this, we also have a feel-good story for the week!
1. Moar Big Partners
Sorare regularly lights it up with partnerships and has announced that they will be boosting efforts here in the year to come.
Joe Pompliano is another big name that could help bring a lot of new eyes to this wonderful game.
Here’s to this being the first of many partnership announcements we see in ‘23.
2. Scouting Mission #2 Came to a Close - to Mixed Reviews
The good - people earned free cards by collecting during the offseason. Again! That’s great, and T2 cards are nothing to turn down.
The bad - what falls into T2 appears to still be all over the place, leaving some managers with the feeling that it might not have all been ‘worth-it.’
The takeaway - Scouting missions still have room to grow after iteration #2, but seeing the mission on your player page, and having something to do in the offseason is never all bad!
3. Autobidding expanded on NBA
Something must have worked during the testing of auto bids on NBA limited cards, because it didn’t take long for the feature to roll out across all rarities.
While this feature has also been met with mixed reviews, I personally am viewing it as a chance to participate in auctions at all hours of the day and night - without needing to remain glued to my computer.
4. Sorare in the States hit the 1K Marker!
Shameless plug for the boys in blue - the Sorare in the States pod has hit the 1,000 subscriber mark!
Here’s to many thousands more gents, keep it up!
5. The community came together
Lastly, in the warm-fuzzies section, this week saw the Sorare community come together to help a manager in need. JustMikeIt did what we have all done at one time or another and slightly messed up a trade offer (Note - I’ve seen this happen a few times, here’s hoping we see a UI refresh making this harder to repeat.)
But I digress, the important part here is that upon the announcement hitting Twitter, we saw a surge of support, outreach, and investigation, resulting in the other manager returning everything!
I love it when we see the good in the world.
Buyin’ & Sellin’
I sat down and thought this week about why I got into the space. I wanted to help people have more fun playing Web3 fantasy sports. More fun comes, typically from two places, winning contests, and making good buys and sells (even though none of this is investment advice). Anyone can tell you about the joys of owning a top 5, heck even a top 50 player, so I plan to stop.
You can always hit up my dm’s for me to tell you that Luis Robert is still a screaming deal. But otherwise, I’m going to dig a bit deeper and bring you players who I find interesting that lie off the beaten path.
Sellin’ High
Matt Chapman
Ltd average: .005 | Rare average: .045
Matt Chapman is fine. He’s solid. But he feels overpriced.
By holding here, you get exposure to a good team, so I can’t fault anyone for holding. However, with a statistical profile more similar to our buy-low candidate today and a price at roughly double, I can’t quite make the math pencil.
For that reason, I would be tempted to sell now and look somewhere else for greater upside.
All this goes out the window if we start to see defensive scoring factor in though because Chapman happens to be a 3x Gold Glove winner in his 6-year career. So watch out for that.
Buyin’ Low
Brandon Lowe
Ltd average: .0028 | Rare average: .0228
Buyin’ low on Brandon Lowe? Couldn’t resist.
An injury-riddled and otherwise unproductive 2022 campaign probably has you reading this and saying “what?” Or if you are new to Baseball entirely, perhaps even “who?”
But hear me out.
First, he is 28, so don’t leave him for dead on account of one poor season. Second, in 2021, just one year prior, he hit 39 homers. Yep, 39. That is already kinda appealing for a player that won’t break the bank. Here’s the icing on the cake - he has flashed a little speed from time to time, and with the rule changes for ‘23, he could reasonably steal double-digit bases.
He’s at least worth a flier as a fill-in player who allows you to spend up elsewhere, and he could very well materialize into more than that.