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 scheduled releases - 2022 Topps Stadium Club Chrome, 2023 Topps Big League, and 2022 Topps Transcendent. We may get the delayed 2022 Bowman Heritage online release as well since Topps currently has it on the calendar for Wednesday of this week, but I feel like I’ve said that multiple times before. Check out my thoughts on 2022 Bowman Heritage in This Week in Baseball Cards from a previous iteration.
We also got notified by Topps at the end of last week that 2023 Bowman Baseball Pre-Orders would be available to the general public on Monday, March 27th.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
***Updated for 2022 Stadium Club Chrome delay and the news that 2021 Bowman Heritage is planned to be dropped along with 2022 Bowman Heritage on Wednesday, March 29th.
2022 Topps Stadium Club Chrome
The chrome version of the popular Stadium Club product, 2022 Topps Stadium Club Chrome is scheduled for release on Friday, March 31st. ***Update - This release has been delayed - it is now scheduled for April 5th.
There is a single hobby configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with one guaranteed auto and can be found for between $125 - $140 pre-sale. The first year of the products existence was 2020 and Topps sold Hobby boxes for $74.99. The 2021 version of the product got a price bump up to $99.99 per box. I expect the 2022 version to be at least that much from Topps. We also had retail blaster/value boxes in the first two years of the product - I would expect to see that again with the 2022 version. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes on its website for $129.99 with a customer limit of 4.
The design is exactly what you would find in regular Stadium Club but every card is given the chrome treatment (as opposed to just a one per hobby box insert). As for inserts, they are all carry-overs from the regular Stadium Club release (Beam Team, Dynasty and Destiny, Team of the Future) with the exception of Trophy Hunters. It’s a throwback to a 1995 Topps Stadium Club insert called Ring Leaders. It’s very bold graphically and gives me a feeling of late 1980’s American pride tattoo art. Maybe each card will have different art that will give me a new perspective, but this is what I get going off the sell-sheet as well as from the original insert. Final thing worth mentioning is just like Stadium Club, most if not all autographs are usually on card and it should be so here again this year.
The checklist is essentially the Stadium Club checklist with 100 more cards added to the base set. However, it gets some of the Topps Update Series additions/changes. We get rookies like Steven Kwan that weren’t in the regular Stadium Club release. We get traded players moved to their new teams for their base cards like CJ Abrams now on the Nationals, even if their autos are still on their old team (Padres). To be clear, we get all the rookie chases in one form or another - Julio Rodriguez, Bobby Witt, Jr., Jeremy Peña, Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, Spencer Torkelson, Hunter Greene, Spencer Strider, etc.
I love Stadium Club and Stadium Club Chrome is just an extension of that love. The first year of the product had a ton of chrome dimpling issues which somewhat turned me off, but I don’t recall it being a huge problem in the 2021 product year. Assuming the quality is good, I will be in on this product one way or another. However, if boxes are over $100, it’s a tough proposition to return value with just a single auto and long odds on parallels. Drop the price back to the debut year, and it’s an insta-buy. Now, it’s more of a singles product and perhaps some retail if I run across it to scratch that ripping itch.
2023 Topps Big League
The kid-focused product is making it’s return after falling off the calendar in 2022 and is scheduled to release on Friday, March 31st.
At the moment, just one hobby box configuration has been announced - a regular Hobby box. It is around $55 pre-sale and does not come with any guaranteed hits. It does guarantee a certain amount of inserts and parallels and that list is quite extensive. In the past, there were scenarios where action figures were part of a hobby configuration, but that is not part of the sell sheet this year and doesn’t look to be part of the product this year. There will likely be all of the various retail formats like blaster boxes, loose packs, etc. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $50 with a customer limit of 8 and blaster boxes for $25 with a customer limit of 12.
The design for the base isn’t anything out of the ordinary - a full border that is more curvy than angular. I actually don’t mind it but it’s not a major selling point. The fun comes with the inserts, highlighted by the 8-Bit Ballers and Topps Big Leaguers. The City Slickers insert will have players in their City Connect uniforms, which I tend to enjoy as well. There is a Game Day Drip Gold Foil insert that sounds like it has potential but no images were included in the sell sheet. Overall a ton of potential, more so than usual with Big League. But given the mass printing on cheap paper stock this product usually has, any interest has to be muted until we have it in hand.
The checklist is the 2023 rookies, so it will be just our second time getting to see these. Interestingly, they have “short printed” a fair amount of the rookies as they break down the checklist into groups - Common, Uncommon (foil - 1 per pack), Rare (blue foil - 1 per box) Super Rare (red foil - 1 in 90 packs or 4 per case), and Legendary (gold foil - 1 in 360 packs or 1 per case). In the Common tier, the chases are primarily Vinnie Pasquantino, Garrett Mitchell and our first opportunity at a Masataka Yoshida rookie card. In the Uncommon tier, Miguel Vargas, Ezequiel Tovar, Logan O’Hoppe, and Hunter Brown are the most interesting names. At the Rare tier we have Gabriel Moreno, Brett Baty, Josh Jung, Vaughn Grissom, Triston Casas, and Francisco Álvarez. At the Super Rare tier, we have Adley Rutschman, Nolan Gorman, Michael Harris II, Gunnar Henderson, and Corbin Carroll. The Legendary tier are all ex-MLB players that are legends of the game.
I rarely indulge in Topps Big League, but the potentially fun inserts and approach to short printing rookies has me intrigued. I wouldn’t spend a lot here because Big League rarely holds any value long term, but I likely will grab something of this to rip one way or another. And that is quite a different opinion than I’ve held at any point since I’ve gotten back into the hobby.
2022 Topps Transcendent Collection Baseball
The highest end product Topps produces, 2022 Topps Transcendent Collection is scheduled to release on Friday, March 31st.
There is only a single configuration - a “regular” Hobby box. It is typically a high-end metallic briefcase locked box that contains all of the cards and it comes with a 50 card base set, 50 autos numbered to 20 or less, one Gold Deco auto (1/1), one 1958 Topps Design Superfractor auto (1/1), one Through The Years auto (1/1), one patch auto or bat knob/nameplate auto (1/1), one pack of four chrome cards which includes a Superfractor, one oversized cut auto, and one VIP Party Invitation. Typically these run in the $25K - $30K range per box and this year’s print run is 99 boxes.
The design is rarely worth discussing, but the base set is a full border wood grain look with the bottom right corner looking like it is rolling up like an old piece of paper/parchment to expose the team logo and player name. The 50 base autos are all gold framed. Each of the 1/1’s have various designs, but again, it’s about the scarcity and original purchase price more than the actual design that drives interest in the product.
The checklist has yet to be released, but it is the 2022 rookie list, so expect to see Julio Rodriguez, Bobby Witt, Jr., Jeremy Peña, Wander Franco, Spencer Torkelson, Oneil Cruz, and others. Vets and legends will also be included, and it will typically be some of the better ones out there - we already see Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Juan Soto with autos in the product from the sell sheet.
I’ve obviously never bought a box (LOL) and I’ve never joined a break (typically in the $500 per spot range give or take), but I have ended up with a base card or two given cheap price points. The real value is in the VIP party invitation and the oversized cut auto. The invitations can sell for $4K - $6K more or less in the aftermarket, and oversized cut autos tend to do really well given the usual strength of the signers. It’s quite the spectacle, but it’s a product that is not for the faint of heart given the big money involved.
2023 Bowman Baseball Pre-Sale
Last week, for the first time in memory, or perhaps ever, Topps put a product on its website with a “pre-sale” designation. It was for 2023 Topps Star Wars Signature Series and it sold out relatively quickly. But that was more likely priming the pump for 2023 Bowman Baseball, a much more massive product, to follow down that path. We were told at the end of last week that 2023 Bowman Baseball would be going on “pre-sale” on the Topps website at 12 PM EST/9 AM PST on Monday, March 27th. Three configurations would be included - blaster boxes, hobby boxes (one auto per box), and jumbo hobby boxes (three autos per box). The product is scheduled to release on April 26th with Topps promising delivery in or around that date.
On schedule, the pre-sale went live with blasters priced at $29.99 per box with a customer limit of 10, hobby boxes priced at $249.99 with a customer limit of 2, and jumbo hobby boxes priced at $399.99 with a customer limit of 2. Checking in three hours later, jumbo hobby boxes were sold out.
Interestingly, Topps did not open up wholesale purchases prior to the pre-sale going live, and last I heard, it was still not available for wholesale purchase…read into that what you will.
ALL THE BOWMAN HERITAGE
Coming out of left field, news flowed out that not only will 2022 Bowman Heritage drop on Wednesday, March 29th, but so will the mythical and thought to be dead 2021 Bowman Heritage. You can see my thoughts on 2022 Bowman Heritage posted a few weeks ago here. As for 2021 Bowman, well, it would have been better off being released in early 2022 as planned. The checklist has taken quite the hit with the main auto chase at this point being Jordan Walker. Beyond that, very few of the signers have risen in value and quite a few have dropped. Some of the other prospect autos of note are Blaze Jordan, Garrett Mitchell, Heston Kjesrtad, Kevin Alcantara, Robert Hassell, Spencer Torkelson, and Zac Veen. There will be base prospect cards of some of the big 2022 and 2023 rookies, but that value isn’t great due to the lack of the 1st Bowman logo and them now having rookie cards of one type or another to chase. Julio Rodriguez, Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll, Gunnar Henderson, etc. The 2021 rookie class have pretty much universally dropped in value and are either buy lows or cut your losses type of cards, which definitely hurts the overall value of the product.
More to come when (if) we see both of these products drop.
***Update - these products dropped as expected on Wednesday, March 29th, and there where whispers about what was going to happen, but I had a hard time believing it. However, those whispers came to fruition - Topps bundled 2021 Bowman Heritage and 2022 Bowman Heritage into a single purchase option. I don’t recall seeing this scenario from Topps since I’ve gotten back into the hobby and wonder if it’s a one time deal (more than likely) or something they will look to do more of in the future to move less desirable product. And to be clear, 2021 is the less desirable product.
The bundle details are essentially that you have to buy one box of each with a max of five bundles per customer. One bundle (one box of 2021 and one box of 2022) costs $249.99 and ships in 3 to 5 days. To re-iterate, there is no way to buy one or the other product separately from Topps. I expect to see a fair number of people dumping 2021 Bowman Heritage sealed boxes at less than half the cost of the bundle over the next few months as the real immediate value will be with the 2022 Bowman Heritage boxes.
