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 Panini Prizm Baseball and 2022 Topps Pro Debut. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. Perhaps we see 2022 Topps Archives Snapshots online exclusive drop ***Update - given all of the other drops, this seems unlikely.
A surprise announcement on Monday after publish is that Topps is dropping a Bobby Witt collaboration for sale on Wednesday, September 28th.
Another surprise drop occurred on Wednesday, September 28th as the Topps Chrome Logofractor Edition boxes showed up, first at the MLB store in New York City, and then shortly thereafter on the Topps website.
And 2022 Topps Gallery started to show up on retail shelves and on the Topps website.
2022 Panini Prizm Baseball
2022 Panini Prizm Baseball is one of Panini’s most popular brands and is scheduled for release on Friday, September 30th.
There are three Hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box, a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box, and a Quick Pitch Hobby box. The regular Hobby box will get you three autographs on average and are currently available pre-sale for about $150. FOTL Hobby boxes went through a dutch auction last week starting at $350 per box and supposedly ended at the floor of $150. Similar to regular Hobby boxes, you should get three autographs on average with one exclusive FOTL autograph (out of the three total) and exclusive FOTL shimmer parallels. The Quick Pitch Hobby box is only providing one autograph on average and 10 donut prizm parallels. Currently these boxes are around $100 pre-sale and is scheduled for release on Friday, October 14th. You’ll also find pretty much all the various retail formats - last year there were mega boxes, blaster boxes, and cello packs. The mega boxes did provide one autograph on average and exclusive haze parallels for easily half the price or less of a Quick Pitch Hobby box, but it was also half the cards. ***Update - Panini is selling regular Hobby boxes for $135 from their website.
The design follows what we’ve already seen for Prizm in 2021 Prizm Football and 2021-22 Prizm Basketball. A full border with an inner hourglass border that is easily recognizable as a traditional Prizm design. Prizm is all about the parallels, and there are roughly 38 base parallels by my count including three different 1/1 version (black finite, black velocity, and gold vinyl). Tiger Stripe and Snakeskin are often very popular versions of these parallels. For inserts, Color Blast is of the rarer, case hit or even rarer than that, variety. They are great looking and will be one of the bigger hits in the product. Lava Flow is another insert I tend to like while the rest are more run of the mill stuff.
The checklist is standard fare rookies, vets, and legends. Name a desirable rookie and you are likely to find them in the product with a base, auto, or both. Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, Bobby Witt Jr., Spencer Torkelson, Julio Rodriguez, Seiya Suzuki, etc. are all there for the taking. I don’t see a big reason to complain about the checklist other than the huge amount of autos likely making it difficult to regularly hit big. One thing to be wary of is that the sell sheet image of the Wander Franco rookie autograph has left a lot of people questioning if it is really a photo of Wander as it sure does not look like him. If it’s truly not him, that makes it a bit more harder to buy into this product as this will turn off a subset of collectors.
With Prizm being an unlicensed product, it often doesn’t get much love from the hobby. And to be fair, without taking value into account, I enjoy other Panini products more (Optic and Select). But I can admit that at the lower end of the price range, essentially costing around $50 an auto, I’ve seen a lot worse deals. If Color Blasts were just a bit easier to hit or cheaper in the secondary market, I would be a bigger fan of this product, because those cards are great. I’ve just never found myself willing to pay the piper for them, and for Prizm Baseball in general. Overall a decent product when its price point is palatable, but something I wont go out of my way for.
2022 Topps Pro Debut
2022 Topps Pro Debut is the Minor League version of the Topps Flagship product and is scheduled for release on Friday, September 30th.
There are two formats of hobby boxes - a regular Hobby box and an HTA Jumbo Hobby box. The regular Hobby box guarantees four autos and can be found for about $75 pre-sale. Previous to the Pandemic, you would get two autos plus two relics, but getting game used relics became a problem during the minor league shutdown and thus they shifted the four hits to all autos. The Jumbo Hobby box, a new format in 2020, has maintained the configuration of three autos plus exclusive chrome base cards to the tune of about 25% of the box. They can be found for about $100 pre-sale. Last year Topps sold regular Hobby boxes for $79.99 and HTA Jumbo Hobby boxes for $99.99. There are no retail formats of this product and I doubt that changes in 2022. ***Update - on Monday, October 3rd, Topps put up Hobby and Jumbo boxes up for the same prices as last year, $79.99 and $99.99 respectively.
The design is exactly the same as the base flagship product, so no reason to dive into that again. The inserts look underwhelming. The MiLB legends image that we have is of Deion Sanders with a 1960 Topps design, which I like, but it’s not really what we are interested in with this product. Maybe there will be something interesting here, but there aren’t really case hits are anything cool to chase, so yeah, moving on.
No checklist is available at the time of publish, but expect it to be full of the more desirable players in the minor leagues. The sell sheet gives us Marcelo Mayer (auto), Henry Davis (base), Benny Montgomery (insert auto) and Julio Rodriguez (insert auto). This is almost exclusively a prospect product with a sprinkling of MLB legends in their minor league gear. That also holds true for the prospects - unlike Bowman products, Pro Debut (as well as Heritage Minor League later this year) will showcase the prospects in the minor league uniforms. ***Update as the checklist is live shortly after publish. The Julio Rodriguez insert auto on the sell sheet did not make it into the product. Plenty of other desirable names have been added with autos - Jordan Lawlar, Corbin Carroll, Colton Cowser, Blaze Jordan, Colson Montgomery, Oscar Colas, Elly De La Cruz, George Valera, Ezequiel Tovar, Kahlil Watson, Sal Frelick, Anthony Volpe, Jasson Dominguez, Jackson Merrill, James Wood, Harry Ford, and so many others.
For whatever reason, prospect products with players in the minor league uniforms as opposed to their big league team’s uniform tend to get short shrift in the hobby. Pro Debut definitely suffers from this, as well as the fact that autos are typically sticker as opposed to on card. I like Pro Debut, and it’s price point isn’t bad considering the price per hit. I tend to dabble, but at the end of the day, I much more prefer Heritage Minor League for a prospect product with players in MiLB uniforms. That product has on card autos plus a nostalgic design, while by this time in the year, I am mostly tired of seeing the flagship design in its tenth product, or whatever it is.
2022 Topps x Bobby Witt Jr. - Crown Collection
2022 Topps x Bobby Witt Jr. - Crown Collection was a surprise announcement by Topps on Monday and it went on sale on the Topps website on Wednesday, September 28th.
There is a single configuration, a 1 pack “Hobby” box that contains 25 cards. Base card comprise 22 of the 25 cards and the final three cards promise two base card parallels numbered to 150 or less and one die-cut insert. One in two boxes will have a hit - either a relic or an auto card. The likelihood is much higher that you will hit a relic rather than auto. Given the odds based on the checklist and parallels/hits, there are an estimated 10,830 boxes with 496 autos and thus 5,473 relics to be hit, so essentially if you do get a hit, it’s less than a 10% chance that hit will be an auto. The single box is selling for $39.99 on the Topps website and there was also a 5 box option that you could purchase for $189.99, essentially a $10 bulk discount. However, that option sold out in a few hours. ***Update - the single box option also sold out before the first 24 hours was up.
The design for the base 50 card set is split up into five different designs - Crown Jewels, 2019 MLB Draft Class, In The Family, Big League Inspirations, and Speedsters. Crown Jewels comprises half the base checklist and is a 60% border approach with the bottom and left side full border and some partial extension of the border into the upper left side of the top of the card. Team logo, player name, and base subset name all live in the bottom border while in the top upper right corner you get the Crown Collection logo. The 2019 MLB Draft Class design seems very much like an updated take throwing it back to the Derek Jeter 1993 Topps rookie card. The Big League Inspirations is similar to the Crown Jewels design, but with a full border and some other minor changes. The Speedsters design is border-less with a gold (foil perhaps) flame (I think) cut out behind the player. The In The Family set, given the one image we have, is border-less and showcases a sepia-ish stadium in the background with two players in the foreground, either brothers or father/son. The die-cut insert is Bigger in Texas and focuses on five players with Texas roots with the die cut being the eastern edge of Texas.
The checklist is curated by Bobby Witt Jr. and includes rookies, vets, and ex-players. Bobby Witt Jr. (of course), Wander Franco, Julio Rodriguez, Oneil Cruz, CJ Abrams, Spencer Torkelson, George Kirby, and Hunter Greene all find there way to rookie cards in the product which should drive some value.
At $40 a box, even with the potential for going hitless or even just getting a relic, I think this is a pretty decent product. The rookies involved, even at a base card level, should give you a good chance of making even some of your money back, and I like various base cards versions like In The Family and the die-cut Texas card. I won’t be going wild on it, but I do think I will pick up a box.
2022 Topps Chrome Logofractor Edition
An unexpected tweet on Wednesday, September 28th, from the MLB Store New York account announced that they had 2022 Topps Chrome Logofractor Edition was for sale in store, and shortly thereafter, Topps started selling it on their website as well.
There is a single configuration that essentially operates like a Mega Box. It has seven packs - five base chrome packs of five cards each and two Logofractor packs of five cards each. It has not yet been reported if the five base chrome packs are going to be base chrome only, like Bowman Mega Boxes, or not. Topps is selling these boxes for $49.99 on their website.
The design for the base has no change and previously it was a headscratcher as to what the “Logofractor” design would be. It has turned out to be similar to a mojo pattern design, but using the MLB logo instead of angular lines. It comes in base, purple, pink, blue, green, gold, orange, red, and rose gold parallels and can also have autos. It will be found with not only the base, but the inserts as well.
At the moment, Topps has said that the cards given the Logofractor treatment are 110 cards (full base set is 220 cards plus 5 extended base short prints). Given that there are inserts given the Logofractor treatment, it remains to be seen if this is 110 base cards + inserts, or 110 cards including select inserts. Rumors are that this includes the five extended base short prints, but we shall see if they are only in the base chrome packs, or if they get the Logofractor parallels as well. Update - the rumors are true - a Julio Rodriguez Logofractor parallel has appeared in the wild.
I like the Logofractor look, but I think that is partially because it’s new/different. Stepping back from the look and the excitement of a new edition we’ve never seen before, it is another way for Topps to increase the print run on a very popular product (I’ve seen anywhere from 42,000 to 55,000 boxes for the Logofractor Edition print run). And hitting the rookie cards that matter here may be tougher than you would hope. In the short term, I expect the boxes and the singles to sell well. In the long term, it just adds more cards to the rainbow run and the desirable cards likely will be extraordinarily expensive (Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, possibly J-Rod and Witt). I wouldn’t be against buying it, and I think it will do well sealed in the long term as long as the extended base short prints are in it, but I am starting to get very fatigued with Topps Chrome and we haven’t even seen whatever the Sonic Edition will be (or have we?). *Update - with the Julio Rodriguez Logofractor appearing, the frenzy should be in overdrive on these boxes in the short term.
2022 Topps Gallery
2022 Topps Gallery starting showing up on eBay and on Walmart retail shelves on Monday, September 26th, with a semi-official release date of Wednesday, September 28th (retail never really gets an official release date).
There are no hobby configurations as this is a retail-only Walmart exclusive product. There will be all the retail versions including a Monster Box that guarantees two autos. Monster Boxes are typically found at the $79.98 price point at Walmart and Topps has now posted them for $79.99. Blaster boxes, fat packs, and loose retail packs are also likely formats to be found. Topps has posted Blaster boxes for sale at $24.99.
The design/approach has not changed much over the years - an art “gallery” approach where the full border cards are designed as if they could be hung in an art gallery. This year they have an angled cut in the upper right for the gallery logo and the lower right for a potential rookie card logo. The Portrait Gallery truly does look like a traditional museum piece with an inner border that looks like a classically hung painting.
No checklist is announced as of yet, but going by eBay listings, we have a lot of the rookies we are looking for - Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, Bobby Witt Jr., CJ Abrams, and Julio Rodriguez. I will update this if any more surprises to the checklist occur.
Gallery cards tend to not hold much value with a few exceptions - big time rookies for their rarer parallels and autos. Keep in mind that the autos are almost always sticker autos - I would be shocked if we see any on card autos in this product in 2022. I mostly avoid picking this up from the Walmart shelves unless there is literally nothing else and I have that itch to scratch, but usually after a single box, I vow not to open it again that year. I don’t see that changing this year.