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 there is one scheduled release - 2023 Panini Prizm Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Panini Prizm Baseball
The well-loved Prizm brand, when found in licensed products, which is not the case here, is scheduled to release on Friday, July 21st.
There are two hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each configuration comes with three autos per box, with the FOTL getting exclusive parallels. Currently Blowout is selling regular Hobby boxes for $148. Last year Panini sold regular Hobby boxes for $135 and I expect to see a very similar price this year. FOTL Hobby boxes went through the standard Dutch Auction process last week, starting at $350 with a floor of $135. Reportedly they sold out at $188. There are usually some retail formats - typically blaster boxes at a minimum and I expect we will see those again this year. ***Update - Panini is selling regular Hobby boxes on their website for $135 with a limit of 12 boxes per transaction (essentially 1 case as 12 boxes = 1 case).
The design of the base is very Prizm-y - very geometric with the required dots so you can really tell how off-center the cards are. The base design really isn’t the big deal - it’s the parallels and the inserts. There are typically more parallels in Prizm than any other product, but no checklist has been released, so we don’t have all the facts yet. Rest assured, there will be at least 50 parallels if not 500, depending on how deep into the animal kingdom Panini decided to go. For the inserts, the always popular Color Blast returns and we get a new-for-baseball Manga insert, which is relatively popular and short printed in other sports Prizm products. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that each case comes with a Hot Box that contains purple ice parallels.
The checklist is yet to be released, but the expectation is that it will follow closely with 2023 Donruss baseball - prospects and ex-MLB players with a couple of token current MLB players like Masataka Yoshida as seen on the sell sheet. Prospects we get from the sell sheet include Elly De La Cruz (technically he just lost his prospect status but he still had it when this product was initially built), Noelvi Marte, Diego Cartaya, Zac Veen, and Curtis Mead. ***Update - Panini posted a partial checklist on their website focused on the base cards. As expected, a huge amount of prospects and ex-MLB players with the lone active in 2022 representative of Bobby Witt Jr. One interesting outlier is Tomoyuki Sugano who has pitched in Japan in the NPB his entire career. He’s been one of the best pitchers in the NPB and was posted for bidding prior to the 2021 season but ended up deciding to stay in Japan. Now at 33 years old, he’s getting past his prime and it’s unknown if he will ever end up in the MLB, but he’s getting into this product for some strange reason. Typically you would find him in MLB products when they have WBC or Olympic team insert sets, such as 2017 Bowman Baseball, but in this scenario he is in the product listed under his NPB team, the Yomiuri Giants. It remains to be sign if there is any team or location reference on the card, however. Focusing on the prospects, the base list is really strong - Elly De La Cruz, Jordan Walker, Francisco Álvarez, Evan Carter, Justin Crawford, Jordan Lawlar, Marcelo Mayer, James Wood, Cam Collier, Jackson Chourio, Junior Caminero, Jasson Dominguez, Roderick Arias, Druw Jones, Jackson Holliday, Colton Cowser, and so many more.
As mentioned earlier, Prizm baseball is unlicensed, and unlike years previous where it was a heavily MLB-based product because of Panini’s deal with the MLBPA, now it’s lost even that partial licensing factor. This is all about the big name prospects, headlined by Elly De La Cruz. Outside of Elly hunting, there isn’t a big reason to be in on Prizm Baseball from a money perspective. On the other hand, fun inserts, fun parallels, and rainbow hunting (if your a glutton for punishment) are the name of the game. I tend to grab a box or two if I run across them at retail spots, but otherwise, it’s just one of many products that I can easily ignore given the low ROI - unless there is a Giants legend or prospect with a Manga or Color Blast in which case that will be hard for me to ignore.