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 three hobby products scheduled for release - 2021 Topps Big League Baseball, 2021 Panini Prizm Collegiate Draft Picks Baseball, and 2022 Topps Archives Signature Series Baseball. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2021 Topps Big League Baseball
2021 Topps Big League Baseball is a low-end, kid-friendly release scheduled for release on Wednesday, April 20th.
There are two hobby formats - a regular Hobby box and a Collector box. A regular Hobby box doesn’t guarantee any hits, but does promise 18 base orange parallels (one per pack). They are currently selling for around $40 at pre-sale. Similarly, the Collector box does not guarantee any hits - you also wont get any parallels promised, but you will get the Super7 figure which is reminiscent of the action figures you would buy off the toy shelves as a kid. They are running around $30 at pre-sale - last year Topps sold Collector boxes direct from their website for $25. There should also be some form of standard retail formats on the shelves as well. ***Update - Topps posted regular Hobby boxes (referred to as Display Boxes) for $39.99, Collector Boxes for $29.99, Blaster Boxes (Value Boxes SE) for $19.99, and Fat Packs for $5.99. Very interesting that they are posting fat packs as I can’t recall them having done this in the recent past.
The base design is very basic with a team color reverse hockey stick giving you the player name, position, team name, and team logo. Really not a ton to dig into here - the Defensive Wizards insert is a spacey, 80’s throwback feel insert. Autos (not guaranteed) are likely all sticker autos. The design really isn’t a huge driver of this product, so we’ll move on.
The checklist has yet to be announced, but it is the 2021 rookies, which may feel a bit weird as we are four months in 2022 already and have been buying 2022 products with that rookie class as the highlights. What we know given the sell sheet is that Ke’Bryan Hayes and Alec Bohm do have rookie cards in the product. At this point, it’s not a big chase given the poor performance of that class.
Overall this product rarely has any ROI and fills the low end, for-the-kids niche. Usually this product sits on the retail shelves along with Diamond Kings and Topps Gallery, but we’ll see how that goes as retail still tends to get cleaned out after a few days even if there are no longer really many instances of people camping out in the aisles of Target and Walmart. That makes it easy to pick up for the kids as it “should” be readily available at MSRP. Not something I ever really buy, but once in a blue moon I’ll buy a few packs.
2021 Panini Prizm Collegiate Draft Picks Baseball
2021 Panini Prizm Collegiate Draft Picks Baseball is back for its third year and is scheduled to release on Friday, April 22nd.
There are two hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and a First off the Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each configuration gives you 5 autos on average (one per pack). The main difference with FOTL boxes is exclusive parallels. The FOTL Hobby box went up for dutch auction on April 14th on Panini’s website. It started at $300 I believe and sold out close to the bottom ($100). Various reports say it sold out at $125 while others say it was at $108 - Panini’s website often doesn’t refresh properly during dutch auctions which leads to various different reports of the bottom. Regular Hobby boxes are going around $130 pre-sale and are scheduled to go live on Panini’s website on release day. There will also likely be retail formats along the lines of blaster boxes and cello packs. ***Update - Panini sold the regular Hobby boxes direct for $109.95.
The design follows the 2021 Prizm design we’ve already seen in the MLB Prizm release as well as what we’ve seen in other sports. The main design element is the bajillion (I’m pretty sure that’s a word even though spell check disagrees) parallels. Something like at least 15 parallels that aren’t numbered at least, if not more and a similar amount of numbered parallels. Not to mention two separate 1/1’s (Black Finite, Gold Vinyl). It’s a love hate relationship. I love all the variety, and some of the cool ones that you don’t really see in many if any products are so good, like the tiger stripes and snake skins. Plenty of inserts as well, but the one worth talking about are Color Blasts. Not sure what the odds are on them, but it is usually much longer odds than a case hit. Color Blasts, regardless of the product they come from and who is on them - they are awesome, and one day I will own one. Final note is that typically the autos are all stickers, but we shall see how it goes this year (not holding my breath that we get on card).
The checklist is full of the 2021 MLB draft guys but sneaks in a few other guys like Sandy Koufax as well as standard high end prospects (Wander, Witt, Dominguez, etc.), especially in the insert sets. In its inaugural year back in 2019, the product came out prior to Bowman Draft and benefited from that. With the 2020 product and now especially with the 2021 product being delayed well beyond the Bowman Draft release, the checklist loses a ton of ROI. It will be nice to have another opportunity at some of the big Draft names at hopefully cheaper price points. There are 220 base cards in the checklist and each player also has an auto in the product, including Sandy Koufax (although his autos are much shorter printed). There are also plenty of other autos in the product - with 5 autos per box, the auto checklist has to be long. This does lead to a watering down of the ROI as well. One final note - Jack Leiter isn’t in the checklist - he is replaced by Giants 2020 5th round draft pick Ryan Murphy in the card number 2 slot.
I really enjoyed this product when it premiered back in 2019. The 2020 version lost some of the shine as the price jumped from sub-$100 to $125+ per box. I wouldn’t mind finding a few packs in a retail pick up, but it’s not something I am going out of my way for currently. The ROI is tough with the sticker autos, non-pro or airbrushed uniforms, sticker autos, and delayed release date. I see the attraction, especially if you are a prizm rainbow chaser or looking to pick up PC players at a relative discount.
2022 Topps Archives Signature Series Active Player Edition
2022 Topps Archives Signature Series Active Player Edition is scheduled to release on Wednesday, April 20th.
There is one configuration - the regular Hobby box. Each box contains a single encased autographed buyback card of a currently active MLB player. Boxes pre-sale are currently going around $90. Last year Topps sold these direct from their website for $50. ***Update - Topps sold these boxes for $69.99 direct from their website.
The design is completely based on the cards that Topps bought back from products of previous years for the players in the checklist. This typically means you wont see any cards older than the last 10 years or so. It is pretty cool to get cards from years past brought back to a current product - sometimes those designs should be left in the past, but most of the time there is some cool nostalgia to see them again.
The checklist has some desirable names in it like Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, Mike Trout, and Vladdy Jr. But there are plenty of hits where it will be a gut punch unless they are PC players/teams - Kevin Newman, Evan White, Patrick Wisdom, Kolten Wong to name just a few. As this is a buy back product, there are NO rookies in it - your best shot for the young guns is to get the 2021 rookies like Jarred Kelenic, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Andrew Vaughn, and a variety of others.
At the Topps direct price of last year, it’s not a terrible shot to take, but I’ve seen so many bad boxes in this product year after year. The big name players almost always feel like they are short printed. And since the checklist only lists the names and there are no true “parallels” that you hit, even though cards are numbered, no one outside of Topps really has the full view of the product print run and how many cards each player “should” roughly be signing. At aftermarket prices, especially at $70+, it’s an easy pass for me. And in general, with my own collecting habits, I much prefer the Retired Player version of this product.