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 - 2023 Bowman Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Bowman Baseball
The first of the three major Bowman releases of the year is scheduled for Wednesday, April 26th.
There two Hobby formats - a regular Hobby box and a Jumbo Hobby box. A regular Hobby box comes with 1 auto while a Jumbo Hobby box comes with 3 autos. The retail format will be the standard blaster box and we expect to see Mega boxes with the mojo exclusive refractor parallel to also show up sometime in the next few weeks on retail shelves. In addition, there are “editions” that are discussed as standalone products and won’t be covered here, but we have already had the 1st Edition product released and should see a Sapphire Edition released, more than likely in the next 4 weeks or so. Topps, for just the second time in recent memory, did a pre-sale of 2023 Bowman back on Monday, March 27th. Hobby boxes were $249.99 with a customer limit of 2, Jumbo Hobby boxes for $399.99 with a customer limit of 2, and Blaster boxes with $29.99 with a customer limit of 10. Jumbo Hobby boxes sold out in a few hours, while it took a bit longer for the other two formats. All formats are still showing as sold out on Monday, April 24th. The question remains if Topps will open up further sales of any format on release day. ***Update - Topps posted new stock for sale - Blaster boxes matching the pre-sale price of $29.99 and an increased customer limit to 20, Hobby boxes for an increased price to $279.99 and an increased customer limit of 6, and Hobby cases (12 boxes per case) for the first time (it was not part of the pre-sale window) at the price of $3,180 with a customer limit of 1. Jumbo Hobby boxes, at least as of Wednesday morning, were not re-posted for sale. Fanatics is also selling Bowman on their website - $29.99 for Blasters and $249.99 for Hobby boxes. In addition, they are selling Retail Display boxes (no guaranteed hits, 24 retail packs) for $139.99.
The design is interesting - I’ve found that in general most people have been fans. It’s a full border with a distinct top and bottom half for the prospect design. The bottom half has a rounded/angular cutout going into the card photo and it gives me the impression of an upside-down doorknob. The rookie/vets design is also full border and has a similar distinction between top and bottom, but it’s more of a 70/30 split, with the bottom section being more of an angular base. Not my favorite design, but also not something I hate either. A bunch of new parallels have come into play with lunar, pearl, and grass parallels. I kind of like the Pearl parallels, but we’ll see how all of these look when in hand. For inserts, we get the usual Bowman Scouts Top 100, Invicta, and Rookie of the Year Favorites. A new one that I don’t recall seeing previously is the Spotlights insert, which I like a lot from the images I have seen - very minimalist with a black background and the player in a lighted spotlight.
The checklist is all about the prospects with 1st Bowman cards. Check out the in depth preview that Max Arterbun and I did for all of that breakdown here. You will also get non-1st Bowman prospect autos like Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, Elijah Greene, etc. Finally, you will have rookies and vets in the base set along with rookie base autos and insert autos. Rookies like Adley Rutschman, Brett Baty, Corbin Carroll, Gunnar Henderson, Gabriel Moreno, Josh Jung, Michael Harris II, Nolan Gorman, etc.
This is one of the biggest releases in the baseball card hobby every year, and this year is no exception. As a prospect card collector myself, it’s hard to sit out any of the big 3 Bowman releases. I will likely get into a break or two, pick up some singles of my PC team/players (Kyle Harrison/Vaun Brown), and possibly buying some retail blasters or mega boxes if I come across them. However, given the usual high price point, it’s something I won’t be going too hard on as with all of these new parallels, print runs feel like they are again higher than ever.