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 one scheduled release - 2022 Bowman’s Best. We may get the delayed 2022 Bowman Heritage online release as well since it did not drop as scheduled last week? Or we may be getting the Charlie Brown kicking the football treatment (not seriously, but it sure feels like it). Check out my thoughts on it in This Week in Baseball Cards from last week.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. ***Update - Bowman Heritage new release date has been posted as March 15th.
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2022 Bowman’s Best
The most controversial product from the 2021 product cycle, 2022 Bowman’s Best is back minus the controversy and is scheduled to release on Wednesday, March 8th.
There is a single configuration for Bowman’s Best - a regular Hobby box. This will often be referred to as a Master Box since it contains two mini-boxes. Each mini-box will come with two autos, so you will end up with four autos per hobby box. The price on this product has been going up and up. My most recent check this weekend had the price at $300 and it was essentially sold out at the majority of the standard online retailers. As of Monday morning, Blowout had it back in stock at $325 per box. Last year, Topps sold Hobby boxes for $259.99 - I expect Topps to sell it for at least a bit more, potentially all the way up to $300 a box. And I expect it to probably sell out fast, even at that price, as it can be a breaker favorite. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $299.99 with a customer limit of 4 and Hobby cases for $2,279.99 with a customer limit of 1.
The design is typical Bowman’s Best, which is to say, nothing is held back and the approach is almost a “let’s get crazy” ethos. In the sell sheet, we get the base rookie/vet design, which looks like the team logo was dropped in a pond of the team color. The base auto design is really “Best-y” with colors, line, angles, slashes, shapes, etc. It’s hard to describe - essentially they use this product to get out all of their favorite design elements and smash them into a card, even if it doesn’t make sense. It’s bright and vibrant, but it’s also a bit lacking in subtlety and uniformity. The inserts that we’ve seen are interesting, but nothing that I want to go out of my way for at the moment. That often changes once I start seeing these in person. Of the three we’ve seen, Bowman Masterpieces is boring, UFO is a fun 80’s style space-y design but nothing special, and the Global Impact die-cut holds the most promise for me.
The checklist is often what drives this product - it is usually the second product of the yearly product cycle where the Bowman Draft prospects have cards. Given the price point of Bowman Draft, getting access to these prospects at a Bowman’s Best price point is a huge factor. Add in that it’s mostly the top names and not a lot of the lower tier guys plus desirable prospects from earlier product releases of the year as well as previous years, rookies, and vets, and the product sells quite well. For the 2022 Draft prospects, we have Jackson Holliday, Termarr Johnson, Elijah Green, Gavin Cross, Zach Neto, Brooks Lee, Kevin Parada, Jett Williams, Chase DeLauter, Eric Brown Jr., Mikey Romero, Jace Jung, Drew Gilbert, and Kumar Rocker. Other prospects include Elly De La Cruz, James Wood, Jordan Lawlar, Marcelo Mayer, Colson Montgomery, Oscar Colas, Jackson Chourio, Yasser Mercedes, Roderick Arias, Samuel Zavala, Jordan Walker, Anthony Gutierrez, Brady House, and Cristhian Vaquero. Rookies are pretty much all there - J-Rod, Witt, Wander, Oneil Cruz, Tork, Peña, CJ Abrams, Royce Lewis, MJ Melendez, Seiya Suzuki, Steven Kwan, Alek Thomas, and Hunter Greene. Looks like Spencer Strider is the main one not making the list. Review the checklist thoroughly to see who has base, autos, and/or inserts. For example, Jordan Walker only has an insert. And traded players may get the mixed treatment - James Wood and Juan Soto both are listed with cards on the Padres as well as the Nationals.
I used to like Bowman’s Best a lot, but that was when the product was sub $200 and closer to $100 than $200 for a Hobby box. Autos were less than $50 per at those price points. Now with the price in the $300+ range, we are looking at $75+ per auto, which is really hard to get value out of. The least popular Bowman’s Best autos can be had for under $10 in the aftermarket sales typically. And even the more desirable ones over the long term sell at a fraction of the cost of their more desirable product autos. You can still come out a winner if you pull a Jackson Holliday or Julio Rodriguez low numbered auto. But their base autos, at least a few months out from the release, won’t likely sniff the price of a box. Good product, bad price, and not much of a PC chase for myself. It’s another year where I will be taking it off from Bowman’s Best in sealed product and break purchases. I may bargain hunt singles, but that’s about it. That’s not to say it won’t be popular, especially for breakers. I think this will be a VERY hot product for a month or two, so plan accordingly.