Helping to keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time in the Baseball Card Hobby for the current week. Check out our Discord for more discussion on this and any other hobby chatter Prospects Live Discord.
This week we have one hobby product scheduled for release - 2021 Pro Set Metal Baseball. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week - we possibly could see 2021 Bowman Heritage but Topps has delayed that drop until an unknown date. We may see other online releases with 2021 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Edition also likely on tap for sometime soon. Retail possibilities include 2021 Leaf Draft Baseball and 2022 Topps Series 1 as occasionally the companies that stock retails shelves will mistakenly put product out before the go live date (2/16 in the case of 2021 Topps Series 1).
2021 Pro Set Metal Baseball
2021 Pro Set Metal Baseball is scheduled to go live on Friday, February 11th and is a new addition to the suite of Leaf Prospect focused products.
There are two hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and a Red White and Blue (RWB) Edition Hobby box. Both boxes contain 6 autographed cards with the RWB version providing exclusive RWB parallels numbered to 6 or less for all 6 autographed cards in the box. Regular Hobby boxes are being sold for $120 direct from the Leaf site and through most retailers. RWB boxes were sold exclusively through the Leaf site on Monday, January 31st for $145 and are currently sold out. There are no retail versions of this product.
The design is the classic Pro Set design that we saw in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Of those, my favorite is the 1989 Pro Set throwback. At this point, no inserts have been announced or teased.
The checklist has not yet been announced, but expect it to closely mirror what we’ve already seen with the two previous 2021 Leaf releases with Metal Draft and Flash. And in the short term, it’s another opportunity to get guys that have yet to have their 1st Bowman like Jack Leiter and Kahlil Watson. Throw in a lot of other strong prospects plus Shohei Ohtani and as usual, the checklist will likely be one of the strongest ones you will find in a prospect product.
I absolutely love this product and if I had to choose one of the core Leaf prospect products to spend my money on in their “2021” cycle, it would be this one. This is the first year that Leaf has the Pro Set license, so you get that extra bump. Anecdotally, I’ve heard football breakers, who’ve already got their first taste of the return of Pro Set, say that the product moves fast. To me that means there is probably a small window on release where these cards will sell really well. Unfortunately they are sticker autos, and the obvious unlicensed negative, so be aware of that if you are looking to sell cards from this product. But I love products that almost exclusively focus on throwback designs and do it well like it seems will be done here.