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 hobby product release - 2022 Panini Select Baseball. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2022 Panini Select Baseball
2022 Panini Select Baseball is scheduled to release on Friday, June 24th and is often a hot commodity in the licensed sports, but is a bit more of a lower end product in the unlicensed baseball category.
There are two hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each configuration promises two autos and two relics on average with the FOTL box promising an additional four pulsar parallels. The FOTL Hobby box went to Dutch Auction on Panini’s website on Thursday, June 16th starting at $350 and according to reports it sold out at $183. Regular Hobby boxes are going around $150 pre-sale and will be sold from Panini’s website on release day - price TBA. There will also be the various retail formats, mainly blasters. Blasters tend to include exclusive parallels with last year having three scope parallels on average. ***Update - Panini is selling these boxes for $135 direct from their website.
The design is what we typically see from Select with three levels of a full bordered base design - Base (common), Premier (less common), and Diamond Level (least common). Each of the three designs are different enough from the other that you will be able to tell them apart, but they still have enough consistency to easily tell they are from the same product. It’s a chrome finish with a ton of fun parallels, but not as many as Prizm so chasing rainbows is slightly more reasonable. Lower numbered cards will have some really good patches/relics, but they are unfortunately likely to be player worn/used instead of game worn. A variety of inserts from standard to rare are in play with my favorite being the Color Wheel. The rest aren’t really my cup of tea, but there’s probably something in there for everyone.
The checklist is your standard fare rookies and vets plus some MLB legends thrown in there for good measure. The big chases will be Wander Franco and Oneil Cruz. No Julio Rodriguez or Spencer Torkelson. We do have one Bobby Witt, Jr. card with the rare Color Wheel insert.
The return on investment isn’t going to be great outside of the rare/case hit cards and Wander and perhaps Oneil Cruz autos/patches. Given the extent of the checklist with a ton of not great rookie hits and then added in vets and ex-MLB players, the unlicensed nature, and player used relics, ripping Select for an ROI is not going to be a regularly positive endeavor. This is a product to rip for fun and purchasing PC players in the secondary market. I don’t mind it, but I also don’t go out of my way for it.
2022 Topps X Players Clubhouse
Topps and the MLB Players Association announced a collaboration on Saturday, June 18th of a special flagship style product that fans could find in MLB Team stores at various MLB stadiums. With the purchase of $149 or more in merchandise, you will receive one pack of cards (quantity unknown at the time of publishing). Checklist is 50 cards and you will get an opportunity at gold /50, red /10, and 1/1 parallels with the design being the Flaghsip design with a “The Players Exclusive” logo design on the front. Checklist also has yet to be released, but the marketing material includes Wander Franco, Seiya Suzuki, and Bobby Witt, Jr. rookies along with stars of today like Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. Not all MLB stadiums will have this promotion and each promotion supposedly is for one day only, so check their website page to determine if there is an option to pick them up first hand. As of now, none of these packs/cards have popped up on eBay.
2022 Topps T206 Wave 1
2022 Topps T206 Wave 1 went on sale as an online exclusive product from Topps on Wednesday, June 22nd.
There is one format, a “hobby” box, but really just more like a pack of cards in a box form. You get 10 cards per box which give you 8 base cards and at least 2 parallel cards. You can purchase a box for $14.99 for 30 days from Topps’ website and then it will go out of stock unless it sells out prior to that (unlikely).
The design is the same as the previous two iterations - a tobacco-sized mini baseball card with a full white border and a stylized player image like the original T206 tobacco cards. Not sure that there’s a reason to deviate from the design as it is a nostalgic approach to a specific product in history, so it kinda is what it is.
The checklist is 100 base cards and is light on rookies, but it has the requisite one is there with Wander Franco. An MJ Melendez rookie is also available, but that is really the extent of it. The rest of the checklist is filled with current and ex-MLB players (old timey ones at that). Final thing to mention here is that at the moment Topps is not listing any autos for the product which is a departure from the first two years of the product if it holds true.
I am not that interested in this product in general because of how annoying it is to own and store non-standard card sizes. To be fair, I have the same problem with oversized box toppers (seriously, stop it Topps). If they really did do away with autos, this product becomes purely a set collector and Wander chasing activity.