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 three scheduled releases - 2022 Topps Finest Baseball, 2022 Bowman Chrome Sapphire Edition, and 2022 Panini Flawless Baseball. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
I covered 2022 Panini Flawless Baseball two weeks ago prior to it being delayed to a release date of this Wednesday, January 18th. Read about it here.
2022 Topps Finest
A mid-tier, chrome based product, 2022 Topps Finest is scheduled for release on Wednesday, January 18th. ***Update - the release date was pushed back two days to Friday, January 20th.
There is a single configuration - a regular Hobby box. It comes with two guaranteed autos per master box - each Hobby box is split into two mini boxes with one auto each. Currently boxes are going for around $250 pre-sale. Last year Topps sold Hobby boxes of Finest on its website for $189.99. ***Update - Topps is selling regular Hobby boxes for $219.99 with a limit of 4 per customer. Topps is also selling cases (8 boxes per case) for $1,669.99 with a limit of 1 per customer.
The design for Finest in most years has been anything but tame and often has a variety of elements and colors, even in the base cards. This year the design gets a bit more one note and focused, while the rookie variation design is downright basic. The base design is borderless with almost a rounded heartbeat style design angled from the upper left to the bottom right. The past few years have given us inserts that have been very popular, at least upon release. Last year we had the 1997 Topps Finest Masters insert and in 2020 we had the 1998 throwback to “The Man” design. This year in the sell sheet it looks like the interest will be focused on the 1994 throwback with the 1994 Finest Cornerstone insert - a hyperspacey color wheel background with a full border. Not really something I’m drawn towards, but those familiar with the old design probably will have a bit of nostalgia for it.
The checklist is typical Finest with a shorter 100 card base set with a relatively even split of rookies and vets. The big rookies chases are mostly all there with J-Rod, Witt, Tork, Wander, Oneil Cruz, Jeremy Peña, Seiya Suzuki, Hunter Greene, Royce Lewis, and CJ Abrams. Finest is typically a summer release and this checklist is evidence of that - Juan Soto is on the National and CJ Abrams is on the Padres, and there may be others that aren’t on their post-trade deadline teams. Overall not much to complain about checklist-wise.
For whatever reason, Topps Finest falls into that regular problem we see with a variety of mid-tier releases like Tier One, Tribute, Triple Threads, Five Star, and others. About two months after release, the value of the cards make it really hard to justify you paid for the box or break. Autos are on card, and there’s a decent amount of good rookie hits, but typically that is similar to the other mid-tier products. Finest definitely has its fans, and I don’t mind it at all, but it’s also nothing that I’ve ever gone out of my way for with the exception of PC cards and inserts I like. I don’t see it changing this year, especially if the price point is anywhere close to $200 or more.
2022 Bowman Chrome Sapphire Edition
An online exclusive, 2022 Bowman Chrome Sapphire Edition is anticipated to be dropped online by Topps on Wednesday, January 18th. ***Update - I had this date incorrect and it is scheduled for Friday, January 20th.
There is only one configuration - a regular Hobby box. The details have yet to be announced as of the time of writing, but I would expect we the exact same configuration that we saw with the 2021 edition - 32 cards with two parallels and no autos (there are none listed on the checklist. The 2021 version was sold on the Topps website for $199.99 and I again expect a similar price or perhaps $20 - $50 more. ***Update - Topps is selling this on their website for $179.99 with a customer limit of 10 boxes. They mistakenly posted 2022 Bowman Draft Sapphire Edition cards on the sell page as well, but that was likely because they had them queued up for that products release next week (***update - this has been fixed). As expected, the configuration looks to be the same as the 2021 version and we’ll just have to wait on the parallels increasing or not once they are in hand.
The design is the same as what we’ve seen for 2022 Bowman Baseball, Chrome, and Draft this product year with the Sapphire treatment. There are no inserts in Sapphire. That just leaves the parallels to discuss. Parallels got up to 125 (Green) for the base and 99 (Aqua) for the image variations. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see another parallel added to the list as long as it stays a non-auto product.
The checklist is the same base checklist we saw with 2022 Bowman Chrome. Prospects, rookies, and vets. A majority of the sought after rookies with J-Rod, Witt, Tork, Wander, Oneil Cruz, Jeremy Peña, CJ Abrams, Seiya Suzuki, and others. For the prospects, we get the 1st Bowman guys were with base cards in the main product - Roderick Arias, Cristhian Vaquero, Samuel Zavala, and plenty of others. However, we don’t get any of the auto-only players, so no Jackson Chourio. There are nine rookie image variations and six prospect image variations - Bryan Acuña, Oscar Colas, and Cristhian Vaquero will be the 1st Bowman guys with variations which should mean the variations WON’T have the 1st Bowman logo, but we shall see. For a deep dive on the prospects, check out my 2022 Bowman Chrome Product Preview - not much has changed between November and now, so the majority of my opinions remain unchanged.
As much as I like Bowman and try to get a piece of each of the three core releases somehow someway, the price for Sapphire is almost always going to be prohibitive for what you get. It’s really a punch in the gut when one or even both of your parallels are vets or less desirable rookies. It’s not as bad, but still not great, when you hit non-1st Bowman prospects. When it comes to Sapphire, I’m just a singles buyer with the occasional cheaper break thrown in there. Unless the price miraculously is at $100 or less per box (LOL), I’ll be passing on it again and just buying a Zavala base Sapphire card in a month or two when the first to market and fomo wears off.