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 two scheduled releases - 2022 Topps Chrome and 2022 Panini Immaculate Baseball. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2022 Topps Chrome
2022 Topps Chrome Baseball is one of the biggest releases on the baseball calendar and is scheduled for Friday, September 16th.
There are three hobby formats and likely every retail format as well. For hobby, we have a regular Hobby box, a Jumbo Hobby box, and a Lite Hobby box. The regular Hobby box guarantees two autos and is currently selling for around $400 pre-sale. The Jumbo Hobby box guarantees five autos and is currently selling for around $800 pre-sale. The Lite Hobby box does not guarantee any autos but does guarantee four black & white mini diamond refractor parallels. Lite Hobby boxes were an online exclusive in its debut year of 2021 and it appears to be a similar situation in year two as no pre-sale listings exist. As for retail, we should expect to see Mega boxes (last year they guaranteed 10 x-fractor parallels), blaster/value boxes (should be a repeat of 2 sepia and 2 pink refractors per box), cellos (although I never saw these in 2021), and loose retail packs. Currently Dick’s Sporting Goods has been selling blaster boxes at pre-sale for $41.99 - after selling out two rounds, they are on their third round of stock and have not sold out as of the writing of this article. ***Update - Fanatics put blaster boxes for pre-sale at $34.99 on Wednesday (9/14) and sold out very quickly. Target posted blaster boxes for sale at $34.99 the morning of release and sold out before most people on the West Coast were even awake. Last year, Topps sold regular Hobby boxes for $199.99, online exclusive Lite Hobby boxes for $99, and blaster/value boxes for $29.99. ***Update - Topps went live with various formats at 12 PM EST on 9/16, surprisingly tweeting the time for go live earlier in the morning. Regular Hobby boxes at $299.99, Lite Hobby boxes at $99.99, Blaster boxes at $34.99, and surprisingly, Cases of Regular Hobby for $3,499.99. Only the third time in recent memory, or perhaps ever, that Topps has sold cases direct from their website.
The base design is what we have already seen plenty of so far with the Flagship products and other products using that design. The main difference is the chrome finish which, for the base card, gives it a metallic/silver border rather than the white border in the paper Flagship products. As usual, we get some new refractors for this year. For the base set, we get a Purple Speckle refractor numbered to 299 and an Aqua Lava refractor out of 199 that replaces last year’s Aqua Wave to the same numbering. In regard to the Image Variations Short Prints, all of the parallels are the same colors and rarity (numbering) but they are all now speckle rather than true colors. There will also be five super short prints, as opposed to the “six” last year. Six is in quotations because one of those was supposedly a Jarred Kelenic super short print which has never surfaced. For the Chrome Base Autographs, we again get the addition of the Purple Speckle Refractor numbered to 299. Last year, True Purple was also numbered to 299, but it moves back to a more traditional numbering out of 250. The Blue RayWave Parallel numbered to 150 replaces the Blue Wave Parallel numbered to 150 as well.
For the inserts, we get the expected Future Stars insert and the 35th anniversary throwback design utilizing the 1987 Topps theme. For the designs we haven’t seen before, we get New Classics, Pinstriped, and Heart of the City inserts. New Classics have yet to be seen, but their focus is on younger top players. Pinstriped is focus on top players, young and not so young, with the artwork giving you that pinstripe art take (think hot rods and low riders). Heart of the City overlays a player on their local city skyline and looks great in my opinion. New Classics is the only insert set that does not also include an autographed version.
The checklist is often what makes or breaks any product, especially Flagship and Flagship Chrome products, but even more specifically, it’s the rookies (or 1st Bowmans depending on the product) in the checklist. The checklist is composed of rookies and vets with one legend thrown into the super short print base (Jackie Robinson and Ken Griffey Jr.). What Topps has decided to do is include almost all of the desirable and qualified rookies possible in the product. You name them, and they are likely there. To do this, at least from a base set perspective, Topps has introduced an Extended Base Short Prints set composed of five rookies - Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodriguez, Spencer Torkelson, Hunter Greene, and CJ Abrams. The big question is how frequently will these “extended base short prints” fall? The more frequent they are, the less value this product and the cards themselves likely hold. The other big name rookies in the standard base set are Wander Franco and Oneil Cruz along with various others who have not lived up to high expectations like Brandon Marsh, Jarren Duran, Shane Baz (injury-related), and Vidal Brujan. Some of the other desirable names, but by no means the biggest names, missing from the base checklist are Alek Thomas, Juan Yepez, MacKenzie Gore, MJ Melendez, Royce Lewis, Seiya Suzuki, Spencer Strider, and Steven Kwan. With the exception of Seiya Suzuki and Steven Kwan, each of those rookies DO have a base rookie autograph.
New this year to the checklist is a base veteran autograph checklist. While there are some good players in it, the only one of real note is Juan Soto and he is in a Nationals jersey (as he is throughout the product). And to be honest, the majority of the vet checklist is pretty rough. No one outside of Soto will likely get you even close to a palatable ROI. It remains to be seen how frequent these vet autos will hit vs. the rookie autos vs. the insert and relic autos.
With a total of 107 rookie autos vs. 133 rookie autos in 2021, at the surface that looks good. But throw in the 47 vet autos for a total of 154 base autos, and suddenly the base auto situation looks a bit more dire. Essentially it implies what we obviously expect - increased print runs. That is also proven out with the fact that we have another parallel in both the base and auto sets (Purple Speckle) and an “extended base short print” going from 220 base cards to 225. So while the rookie checklist looks desirable, it still means that the big names will likely be harder to hit on a per box basis. We saw in 2021 how poorly box breaks went even with a selection of players we were chasing - most boxes were full of pitcher and backup catcher autos. If that happens again, breaks of this product could soon turn into a bloodbath and trying to hold sealed wax may end up being a negative proposition. Ultimately we’ll see if the checklist vs. how the boxes break given the print run ends up.
I like Topps Chrome and when it comes to my PC players, it is one of the linchpins of that collection. Unfortunately given the price point and likely how hard collectors will be going out of the gates on this product, I will be doing very little with it in the short term. If I run across some at retail, and assuming blaster boxes are more like $30 than the $40+ we are seeing pre-sale with Dick’s, I will definitely be grabbing some for personal rips. Outside of that, I will likely be watching from the sidelines until I see how it breaks and see how frequently the extended base short prints hit. I will be looking to grab the Heart of the City insert base set given what we’ve seen of it so far.
2022 Panini Immaculate Collection Baseball
2022 Panini Immaculate Collection Baseball is a mid-tier release that is scheduled for Friday, September 16th.
There are two hobby formats and no retail formats of this product. The hobby configurations are a regular Hobby box and a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each variation comes with six hits on average with four of those including autographs and two of those being relics. I have seen in the past additional cards or on rare occasions less cards when it was a hard to hit relic like a cleat. There are no base cards in the product. The main difference between regular Hobby and FOTL Hobby is that you are guaranteed a Pink or Holo Gold parallel auto which should be numbered to 10 or less. The regular Hobby boxes are going for around $400 pre-sale and should be available for purchase direct from Panini towards the end of the week with a price point TBD. FOTL Hobby boxes were dutch auctioned last week starting at $750 and selling out around $430 (last year they sold out at just under $400). ***Update - Panini will be selling regular Hobby boxes for $339.99 on their website on Friday, September 16th.
The design is continuing the standard theme we find with Immaculate on a yearly basis. Mostly starting with a white base and then slashing and swooping golds and strong primary colors across thicker stock cards. I don’t look at them and “ooh and ahh”, but I also tend to like the designs. Relics also usually stand out in this product with nice multi-color patches and a lot of variety in equipment types that get used. Unfortunately most if not all relics are player worn/used rather than game worn/used. From an autograph perspective, you’ll find a pretty even mixture of stickers and on card autos, at least in the past. This is easily something that could change towards being sticker heavy in most all products nowadays, so we will wait and see.
The checklist is yet to be released, but typically this is a full kitchen sink approach. A lot of rookies, plenty of current vets, a decent amount of ex-players, and a sprinkling of prospects. Given what we’ve seen from the sell sheet, for the rookies we have at least Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, Edward Cabrera, Jarren Duran, and Luis Gil. For current players, we have Jose Altuve, Clayton Kershaw, Christian Yelich, and Andrew Vaughn. For retired players, we have Rod Carew and Alex Rodriguez. And finally for prospects we have Riley Greene.
I always like this product and enjoy picking up PC cards from it, but usually only do so in the aftermarket. The sealed product price point is more than I am willing to pay for most products, let alone an unlicensed one, no matter how much I like it. I don’t mind grabbing my PC teams in a PYT if they are cheap (they should be) or getting into a mixer break with a box of Immac included in it. All in all, a good product from Panini with a fair amount of fans and something worth considering.