Sorare MLB Market Watch – 12.26.22
Holiday news and notes for your favorite way to play Fantasy Baseball.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone reading this!
It is going to be a longer update this week, so buckle up! We have Sorare’s annual review, Scouting Mission updates, and your weekly buy-low and sell-high to cover.
Let’s do this thing!
News & Notes
I would be remiss to not lead with big papa Sorare dropping their Annual Review this last week. It is worth a cover-to-cover read if you are at all interested in Sorare, the company, as well as their vision for the upcoming year. I wouldn’t be writing this to you now if not for a few key developments in ’22, namely the successful (and super fun) launch of the MLB product.
If you are interested in the bullet points, there were several main goals for the Sorare product in 2023:
Simplify the Product
Enhance Collectability
Facilitate Manager Progression
Connect and Socialize
Enhance Live Experience
Merge Fantasy and Reality
But you aren’t interested in bullet points, you want the analysis of what this means for you as a player and fan. So let's take the points one by one and read between the lines a little for what might lie ahead.
Simplify the Product
I write about the baseball side of things, so I glossed over mentions of ETH thresholds. Would they be cool for MLB managers? Definitely, but I would imagine we are far out from that if we ever see it at all.
More important for our baseball interests is the potential launch of the “manager dashboard” – if this makes it easier to use the product overall, I am all for it. The UI within Sorare has improved but remains somewhat clunky. Improvements here are always a nice thing to see on the horizon.
Enhance Collectability
I dove deep into the Scouting Mission appeal in a past weekly update here and will talk a bit more about it in the section below. Anything that gets managers using the market and interacting with one another outside of regular GW competitions just adds to the overall appeal of the product.
Facilitate Manager Progression
I’m no great football/soccer player on Sorare, but I have enjoyed having the Academy series both as a way to help learn a new sport and a way to help build up my collection. Seeing new ways to put common cards to work on the baseball side would be great, since managers' collections of commons tends to grow quickly with regular play.
Perhaps more worth your attention is a little line nestled at the bottom of this section:
We’re going to equip managers with as many tools as possible to build their dynasty, supplementing existing resources — like Sorare Data, Price History, and Marketplace tool tips — and providing year-round editorial offerings that offer roster recommendations and ranks.
SorareData is already doing excellent work, and the price history drop was a great addition that I’ve mentioned before, but this quote signals even more focus on helping managers compete. I got giddy because this, to me, means an increased fantasy-impact focus from the Sorare product in general. That’s my jam. I mean, we can talk about historical performance all day long, but beginning to weigh in future value more effectively will help lead to a more robust game, a longer-term mindset, and a more efficient card market overall.
Sign me up to help you find every edge we can between now and then.
Connect and Socialize
Hello play with friends feature across the product, and yes please! As I have said before, anything that breaks the barriers between faceless competitions and the real world with real friends and real people, is going to be a huge win for the product’s longevity.
The day is likely coming when cards are just your ticket into the club, rather than the primary reason to play the game.
Enhance the Live Experience
App enhancements! Good lord yes. The product has a long way to go before being able to stand next to longstanding fantasy sports apps, but any progress here in terms of interface, lineup setting, data visibility, and update speed will go a long way.
Merge Fantasy and Reality
This is a more high-level vision kind of point, but relates back to my point with the Connect and Socialize section. Whatever can be done to make the cards in this game be the entry layer, with more robust experiences unlocking for users out in the real world can help take this from the fringes - crypto/Web3/NFTs - to the center stage. We keep seeing hints and positive signs as time goes on, but the extent Sorare delivers on this part of the vision could dictate whether we see ESPN-level public awareness.
Any of you that participated in the MVP round of scouting missions probably left feeling at least slightly confused. There was no real interface with the product itself, just a list in a Medium article and you (the user) checking your gallery for players you needed to add. Well, that has gotten significantly better. On Friday, I popped into Sorare to do my daily card swaps, which I still highly recommend for you all too, and I noticed the “Scouting Missions” tab in my gallery.
We’ve gained a progress bar detailing how the collecting is going. When you click into the “Current Mission” you get a popup window outlining who qualifies for the challenge, who you have collected so far, and a link to listings for those you don’t.
All in all, this is a very good feature add, and should help boost interaction during the offseason baseball drought.
Short-Term Flip & Long-Term Buy
Speaking of scouting missions, we are midway through the second scouting mission, called “Season One Top Performers.” Similar to last week, I figured it would be fun to outline one player from the list that I would definitely be selling into this competition, and one I would be looking to buy.
Short-Term Flip
Ltd 3-day average: .0081 | Rare 3-day average: .0118
Candelario was the definition of streaky this season. I happened to have a common copy of his card, which single-handedly helped win me a limited card or two. Basically, when he goes off, he really goes off. That’s the good.
The bad is that those boom weeks don’t happen often, or predictably, enough for him to be a consistent starter for most managers.
If I had copies of his card, this seems like a great time to offload them, since you should have a ready-made market as people look to fill out their scouting mission roster.
Long-Term Buy
Ltd 3-day average: .0183 | Rare Last Public Sale: .082
On the other hand, even with a slightly more competitive market, I would be looking to acquire Semien for the long haul.
He’s a legit double threat for homers and steals on a squad with some sneaky-good batting potential. Honestly, aside from being a little older than players like Carlos Correa or Francisco Lindor, he offers much of the same appeal to fill out your MI slot. In fact, he stole more bases than either of them last year, while seeing equivalent or better HR numbers. He just lags a bit in terms of overall batting average.
For many managers on a budget, this trade-off is likely worth it.