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 hobby product scheduled for release - 2021 Leaf Flash Baseball. On Tuesday, January 18th, 2021 Draft Sapphire was posted for sale by Topps on their website for 582 Montgomery Club members. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week - we probably should be seeing 2021 Bowman Heritage but Topps has delayed that drop until an unknown date. We may see other online releases with 2021 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Edition also on tap for sometime soon.
2021 Leaf Flash Baseball
2021 Leaf Flash Baseball is the second prospect release of the product cycle for Leaf and has a similar approach that you just saw with Leaf Metal Draft. It is scheduled for release on Friday, January 21st.
Unlike Leaf Metal Draft, there is only a single format - the regular Hobby box in the standard Leaf Hobby box format of six autographed cards per box. Boxes went on sale this past weekend to the public direct from Leaf’s website for $105 a box and the online retailers are currently at the same price point. There are no retail formats.
The design is standard Leaf Flash fare with the speckle/sparkle chrome approach. The base set has a geometric hexagon shape in the background that I assume is supposed to give you the impression of a camera aperture in the process of closing to snap a photograph. Flash tends to focus on a camera/flash photography theme year after year and uses the “Flash” terminology in most or all of inserts. This year they showed in their sell sheet the Flash Forward, Flash of Brilliance, and Flash Photograph inserts with backgrounds meant to match those themes. But they all basically stick to a similar overall look and feel with the base design.
The checklist has not yet been released, but expect it to closely mirror the 2021 Leaf Metal Draft checklist. On the sell sheet we got images of the following players - Bryan Acuña, Robert Puason, Jordan Lawlar, Marcelo Mayer, Brady House, Cristian Hernandez, Bobby Witt Jr. and Blaze Jordan. In addition, Leaf has said that there will be an extremely limited number of Shohei Ohtani autos in the product.
Leaf Flash is not one of my favorite of the Leaf Baseball prospect products every year. I prefer Metal Draft and Trinity. And if I am buying a box, I prefer Valiant to get that slabbed card, although Valiant’s design is usually my least favorite. I’ll usually end up with a card or two from the product simply through buying into cheap baseball mixers as it is a product often used in breaks. The six autos for less than $20 a pop is good value and does help up the hit count for mixer breaks. However, as we all know, most Leaf products are not highly valued in the hobby so it is definitely a buyer beware situation. I’ll be avoiding Leaf Flash this year outside of maybe a PC card or two.
2021 Bowman Draft Sapphire Edition
2021 Bowman Draft Sapphire Edition is back for its third year with the same tried and true format and the same tried and true price increase.
There is a single format - a regular Hobby box. The box is being sold direct from Topps on Tuesday, January 18th to 582 Montgomery Club members at $199 a box with a limit of one box per MC account. Any MC purchaser is not allowed to purchase another box when it goes live to the public, likely later in the week. The box comes with 32 cards and provides 2 parallels on average. There are no “hits” or autos in the product. In its inaugural 2019 year, boxes cost $35. In its second year in 2020, box prices doubled to $70. So they decided to almost triple it in 2021* (even though the calendar says 2022, it’s a 2021 product). ***Update - this product was “released” to the public on the following day, Wednesday January 19th. It appears that bots purchased most if not all of the public facing allocation.
The design is identical to the 2021 Bowman Draft base design with the Sapphire treatment (essentially atomic refractors). There are no insert cards. The base cards should be “Sapphire Blue”, although in 2019 they chose to go with the standard grey design base color. They “corrected” that in 2020 and hopefully maintain that for 2021. Last year they added an “Aqua” Refractor Parallel numbered out of 20 to help the print run. It is not yet known if there are additional parallels being added to the 2021 product run.
The checklist is not yet out, but expect it to be identical to the 2021 Bowman Draft base chrome checklist with all of your prospect chase cards available for hunting.
At under $100, this is a buy all day long, even with a weaker overall Draft product in 2021. At $200 a box, assuming you can get it at retail price, it becomes a lot harder pill to swallow. If you don’t hit a parallel of one of the top 10-ish hitters in the checklist out of the possible 200, you are likely down a LOT of money. If you are buying on the secondary market, the pain will be even more. For that reason I am out on the product and will only be buying a PC card or two and perhaps finding a break or two with the product included.