Prospects Live Top 100 Card Board

One of the aspects I felt like the team at Prospects Live did very well before I joined the staff was putting together informative and actionable lists. Now that I am a contributor here, I had to join in on the fun. Taking the current Prospects Live Top 100 Prospects as the foundation, I’ve gone through the last year of sales of each prospects 1st Bowman Base Autographed cards from eBay and compiled my Top 100 Card Board.

My primary goal is to give everyone a look at the sales trends over the last 365 days from eBay, the main marketplace to buy and sell cards. It has always been frustrating for me, as a collector, that only the last 3 months of listings are publicly and freely available. Second, I have compiled the product information for where you can find every Top 100 prospects 1st Bowman card. Another minor collecting frustration has been that I did not have anywhere to go to see this information all in one place. Finally, I anticipate this list to be something I keep up regularly to follow the trends and provide the building blocks for my, and hopefully your own, Card Stock Watch. I would also recommend joining our Prospects Live Discord where you can chat with some of the best prospect and fantasy experts in baseball and at the same time explore the prospect card market and the larger baseball card world in our Baseball Channel.

Initial Takeaways

There were a fair number of big movers over the last 12 months, either from an overall dollar amount or on a percentage basis or both. Julio Rodriguez ($115/55% increase), Dylan Carlson ($60/100% increase), and Nate Pearson ($40/114% increase) all jumped off the page to me, largely driven by their ascension to the top tier of prospect lists and eye popping talent. The next thing I found worth observing are the no 1st Bowman autograph guys - Jordan Balazovic (1st Bowman base in 2020 Bowman), Isaac Paredes (1st Bowman base in 2018 Bowman), George Valera (inserts in 2019/2020 Bowman), Erick Pena, and Jose Garcia of the Reds. I will be paying close attention to when these guys get their first Bowman autos, especially Pena and Garcia. Finally, there is a lot of noise in the data. Cards don’t have UPC’s or similar unique identifiers which causes a lot of dirty data that I have attempted to clean up. See my methodology and disclaimers below.

Methodology and Disclaimers

  • Using 1st Bowman Base Autographed cards as the Benchmark

  • Raw cards only - All graded cards are excluded

  • Card sold prices are the Average Price for that month

  • Rounding everything up to 5 or 0

  • Excluding redemptions not yet redeemed

  • Excluding “Buy It Now” - using only Auctions

  • Excluding “Please Read” or “Read” listings in most scenarios

  • Excluding Auctions with only 1 bid as there is too much unknowns with those listings

  • Excluding Sapphires, Mojos, 1st editions

  • Excluding “lot” sales if they included a 1st Bowman

  • Excluding Paper 1st Bowman

  • Time frame - to keep the table view manageable, I chose 4 closed months - Previous month, 3 months back from that, 6 months back from that, and 11 months back from that (eBay does not show any listings over 365 days old, so I cannot logistically go back and look at the sales in the 12 months back time frame)

  • Some players had 1st Bowman base cards, but no autograph in that product. Their first Bowman auto did not appear until a subsequent product (or has not yet appeared) - I have noted those in the comments