Baseball Cards: The Curious Case of Andrew Painter's Bowman Chrome Autographs

Topps has some peculiarities with the rarity of their autograph subjects, most notably in their Bowman Draft release. It’s been this way for years. Gunnar Henderson is one of several 2019 subjects with an extreme volume of base autographs. In 2020, Jordan Walker’s base Chrome autographs were very limited, and he has no Refractor parallels /499 (he has other parallels). But to me, the most significant of these peculiarities among top prospects is Andrew Painter in 2021.

prospect status

The most significant reason this is worth discussing is Painter’s prospect status. We have him at number 6 in our preseason Top 100. He’s the highest-rated pitcher there, and Joe and I also had him as our #1 pitching prospect for the hobby. Simply put, he’s one of the best prospects in baseball by any measure.

There are other prospects who have extremely short runs of autogrpahs in Bowman Draft, such as Mikey Romero in 2022 and Anthony Solometo in 2021, but for now they’re not close to where Painter is as a prospect. We can put a pin in those guys to flush out their rarity later if we need to. But for now, it’s not necessary - their card prices aren’t seeing the incredible heights that Painter is.


His Autos are HOW RARE?!?

First let’s address Painter’s other autographs from the 2021 Draft product release season. He was in a few unlicensed products, like Elite Extra Edition, Prizm Draft, and Leaf Metal. And in Bowman Draft, he had autographs in two insert sets: Under Armour All-American, and redemptions for Class of 2021.

And his vaunted Bowman Chrome Autograph (BCA)? Also all redemptions. At release, they were imperceivably hard to hit - in a 110 case break, just one single base auto was hit. I can scour Twitter to add another base and a RayWave to that count, but that's it.

Of course, what we see on social media isn’t everything. Some people hold and redeem, and we never hear about what happens with those. Factually, some of Painter’s redemptions have come through, and some haven't. What we know is that of the redemptions that have been fulfilled, only SEVEN have been graded by PSA - from a set that has over 13,000 graded cards!

Parallel to that low Pop Report, there are only four Painter BCA that have recently been on eBay - a base, (2) Gold Wave, and an Orange. Curiously enough, there have also been ZERO unfulfilled redemptions. At a time when there there have been 40+ Class of 2021 Painter autos transacted or listed (some of which are redemptions) that’s a very telling tale. Painter only has roughly 300 total Class of 2021, folks. If it’s a similar percentage of Chrome Autographs seeing the market… it’s conservative to say that there could have been as few as 50 BCA redemptions packed out.

so what happened?

“But there’s 50 Gold Wave Refractors alone” you say? Not necessarily. We don’t know what Topps did with the packout of the redemptions. We don’t know how many autographs Topps truly expected Andrew to return, or exactly when. We don’t know what Topps did with the autographs Andrew returned to them. Was some there some sort of damage, or was something else? We do know he returned quite a few cards to Topps:

Are the redemptions we did see a bit of a mistake? Should he have been scrubbed from the autograph set like we saw with a few 2022 signers (such as Cade Hunter and Karson Milbrandt)? Does Topps have a bunch of BCA Andrew Painter in a fulfillment center with no corresponding redemptions? It doesn’t matter in the end. What really matters is that we as collectors move on - to what we can collect of Painter’s, because for 99.9% of us, it’s not a BCA.

ACCEPTANCE

So what’s Painter’s best obtainable autograph, since the BCA isn’t it? There isn’t an obvious answer. Above all the answer is to collect what you want, but as I’ve mentioned a few times above there’s options.


Painter’s Class of 2021 autographs seem to be his most sold & traded Bowman autographs from 2021 - they’re sticker autos, and the redemptions do not seem to have issues being fulfilled. With Gold and Red parallels, there’s well-defined tiers of collectability. His All-American autos are seemingly a bit tougher to find, but this set is more of a niche collectable. Although they’re on-card, they were signed prior to his being drafted, don’t have any MLB association, and are not on Chrome stock.


Both Class of 2021 and All-American autos are somewhat rare and are well over $100 at this time though, so there’s still some barrier. For an affordable licensed auto, let’s turn the page to 2022 and look at Bowman Platinum. This release is generally not a good one - a retail-only, mostly sticker-auto product, it caters to lower end collectors. But it carries a fully-flushed out compliment of seven parallels - so there’s structure that creates a rainbow (of sorts) to chase. Any they’re shiny! Painter’s base autos from this set are still well under $100, and they’re the only licensed game in town, so to speak.


My favorite of his unlicensed autos from the 2021 Draft release season is his Elite Extra Edition. It’s a similar purchase price to the 2022 Bowman Platinum, but it’s on-card. Parallels tend not to matter as much for EEE from a price perspective, but there’s a chase element there as well. The photo on this EEE card, for my money, is also better than Platinum.

Image from eBay

To me though, the most obvious answer is to not worry about the auto. He has a full compliment of 2021 Bowman Draft base & Chrome parallels that are just as collectable, and there’s every level of entry into those that you can imagine. Happy collecting!