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 Panini Mosaic Baseball. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. Yet again I say perhaps we see 2022 Topps Archives Snapshots online exclusive drop (Update - apparently this has been pushed out to early 2023). Maybe we get 2022 Topps Chrome Sonic Edition, whatever that is. Or even 2022 Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition? Perhaps, 2022 Topps Chrome Ben Baller Edition? ***Update - Topps added 2022 Topps Mini to its checklists which likely means a release is imminent. Outside of the checklist, there is no other information. I will update this post if it indeed drops this week.
2022 Panini Mosaic Baseball
It’s a bit unclear, but it appears 2022 Panini Mosaic Baseball is scheduled to release on Wednesday, November 9th if we go by when Panini will be selling boxes on their website.
There are three(?) hobby formats - a regular Hobby box, a First Off the Line Hobby box (FOTL), and a Choice Hobby box. Both the regular Hobby and FOTL Hobby boxes promise three autos on average with the FOTL promising two additional FOTL-exclusive parallels. Choice Hobby boxes promise two autos on average with two Choice-exclusive parallels and two Choice-exclusive rookie variations. According to the online retailers, Choice won’t be available until November 18th. There is also the possibility of a Quick Pitch configuration as we had one last year, but I haven’t seen anything on it. Last year that configuration was one auto with various Quick Pitch exclusives. I have heard that Mosaic Baseball regular Hobby was completely skipped from being allocated to distributors this year, so finding it for sales from the major online retailers is not currently possible. Panini will be selling regular Hobby boxes online direct from their website on Wednesday, November 9th at which time I will update the price point they sell it at. FOTL Hobby boxes were dutch auctioned last week starting at $300 and hit the floor price of $130. Choice Hobby boxes are selling for $115 from online retailers at the moment. There are typically retail formats along the lines of blasters and mega boxes, but with distributors being cut out from regular Hobby boxes, perhaps there are some supply issues and that may or may not impact retail. ***Update - Panini is selling Regular Hobby boxes for $130 direct from their website.
The design with bold geometric shapes, bold colors, and vinyl/mosaic style overlay/parallels. A ton of different inserts will likely lead to something that speaks to most collectors - the stained glass insert returns as one of the more popular ones in the product on a yearly basis. Of the inserts we get to see on the sell sheet, the Global insert is my favorite, mostly due to its simplicity.
The checklist is what we’ve seen in Panini releases up to this point like Mosaic and Select - full or rookies, vets, and ex-MLB players. The rookies include most of the desirable names collectors are hunting - Julio Rodriguez, Bobby Witt Jr., Spencer Torkelson, Wander Franco, Oneil Cruz, etc. Interestingly J-Rod gets his own dedicated auto insert that is typically not found in this product - an Optic Rated Rookie Auto insert. Feels a bit strange and would be interested to hear why they decided to do this, especially when we have the context around the Optic Baseball release and whether J-Rod will have Rated Rookie autos in that product as well.
Last year I wasn’t that into Mosaic, especially since the design didn’t feel all that different than 2020 Mosaic Baseball (which was a subset of the 2020 Chronicles Baseball product). Team color match parallels did look nice though. This year the design has been differentiated enough from previous iterations, so that isn’t a negative for me any more. It still falls into that unlicensed bucket of cards I tend to ignore though, so I wont be going out of my way for it. ROI tends to not be good either outside of a few exceptions (probably J-Rod and Witt). I may grab a bit of retail if I run across it, but ultimately don’t see a ton of value or interest unless it got really short printed, which may be the reason why distributors were cut out. We’ll see when the product gets out into the public’s hands on that score.