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 - 2022 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary Baseball
Back for it’s second year because collectors were clamoring for it (or perhaps the exact opposite), 2022 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary Baseball is scheduled to release on Wednesday, August 9th.
There are likely three hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box, a Lite Hobby box, and potentially a Mega box, but Mega boxes have yet to be listed anywhere for pre-sale. The regular Hobby boxes are currently going for $110 and it comes with 1 autograph per box. Last year Topps listed these for $154.99 and eventually heavily discounted them to get the inventory off the site. Lite Hobby boxes were $60 a few days ago, but are now going for $70 and they come with 4 exclusive mini-diamond refractor parallels. While not guaranteeing any hits, they will also include hard to hit exclusive pink parallel autos. Last year, Mega boxes had 4 exclusive prism refractor parallels, and Topps sold them for $59.99 on release. Fanatics released it’s own exclusive version, but as I remember, the only difference was that instead of a red box, it was a blue box. I think prices fluctuated on these between $40 and $60. I would be surprised if we don’t get this configuration, or some form of it, again. ***Update - Topps is selling regular Hobby boxes for $99.99 with a customer limit of 8. Hobby box cases (12 boxes per case) are being sold for $1.099.99 with a customer limit of 2. Lite Hobby boxes are being sold for $59.99 with a customer limit of 8. Lite Hobby box cases (16 boxes per case) are being sold for $899.99 with a customer limit of 2.
The design is based off of 1953 Topps Baseball because it’s the “Platinum Anniversary” of that product. The Platinum Anniversary is 70 years, and the inaugural edition of this product last year was based on the 1952 design, so one product year later (but not calendar year), we get the 1953 throwback version. I’m still not sure how that math works out, but sure, I’ll just proceed as if it does. 1953/Platinum Anniversary is mostly a full border with a large section of the bottom of the card taken up to display the player name, position, and team, with the team logo shown in a superscript type of way. A relatively basic design that I don’t mind, but also nothing overly interesting. As usual, Topps is adding about 10 new base parallels and 1 more auto parallel (they have dropped some and added others, but this is the rough count of additions overall). They have decided to use a parallel called a “Toile”, which is based on a French term for “cloth” and has come to mean a very decorative pattern featuring repeating illustrations. In this case, it’s of classic, old-timey baseball images. I don’t mind the actual parallels, although they do look a bit distracting. What I do mind is the name, as it’s ripe for mispronunciation as well as throwing a “t” on to the end of it. I would bet money this becomes known as the toilet parallel, which is not really a great marketing decision.
The checklist is based on the 2022 product rookies, so you get one last shot at Bobby Witt Jr., Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, Julio Rodriguez, Hunter Greene, Seiya Suzuki, CJ Abrams, Royce Lewis, Jeremy Peña, Lars Nootbaar, Spencer Strider, Spencer Torkelson, Brandon Marsh, Bryson Stott, and my favorite 1880’s dock worker/pitcher Packy Naughton. Unfortunately the biggest chase, J-Rod, won’t have an auto, but a fair amount of the rest of the rookies will. There will also be plenty of vets and ex-MLB players in the product. Surprisingly, Topps cut the base checklist down from 700 last year to 500 this year. Unlike last year, this year we are getting Base Image Variations, as opposed to the one hard to hit Mickey Mantle Short Print. There is also a 14 card insert set of Topps Employees that is billed as Super Short Prints, and these employees are assigned to actual teams. I’m guessing they are fans of those teams, and breakers are likely happy that they don’t have to random those cards. One final note - these are pre-trade deadline team assignments - so CJ Abrams is on the Padres, Juan Soto is on the Nationals, Brandon Marsh is on the Angels, etc.
This product had a decent amount of hype in 2021 and then the continuous delays leading to almost a year of wait time and overprinting killed most of the value. Hopefully the overprinting hasn’t happened again, but I’m not holding my breath. I think this will be hot for a minute since we’ve started to get past the Topps Chrome hype and there aren’t any other new, major baseball products to occupy our attention. The strange feeling of fresh 2022 rookies will likely find some collectors into it, and likely turn off others as they have already moved on. If the price is cheap enough, I could see this being fun, but I am happily sitting on the sidelines since the Giants don’t have any chases I am interested in.
Fanatics vs. Panini
Last week Panini sued Fanatics for various monopolistic/anti-competitive practices and this week Fanatics in turn returned the favor. Rather than break it down and talk about stuff I don’t fully grasp because I am not a lawyer, I’ll just post the breakdown threads of each of these lawsuits from the actual Hobby Lawyer, Paul Lesko. My uninformed opinion when I saw the original Panini lawsuit was that it sounded tenuous at best, and then the follow up from Fanatics cemented that opinion. My opinion is not worth anything in this situation, however, so check out a real lawyer’s opinion if you are interested: