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 we have four releases - 2023 Topps Update Series, 2023 Panini Select Baseball, 2023 Leaf Exotic Baseball, and 2023 Bowman Platinum.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Update Series
The final installment of the yearly Topps Flagship product line, 2023 Topps Update Series releases on Wednesday, October 11th.
There are two Hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and a Jumbo Hobby box. A regular Hobby box comes with one hit - a relic OR an auto, with the odds heavily weighted towards the relic. Each Hobby box also comes with a silver pack containing four 1987 throwback design mojo refractor cards. Topps is selling these boxes for $89.99 with a customer limit of 4. Last year Topps sold these boxes for $79.99. Jumbo Hobby boxes come with three hits - one auto and two relics. Each Jumbo Hobby box comes with two silver packs plus a Topper Card (an oversized card). Topps is selling Jumbo. Hobby boxes for $169.99 with a customer limit of 2. There are all the various retail formats - retail boxes, value boxes, hanger boxes, and Update Series exclusive Super boxes with silver pattern foils - and Topps is selling Value (Blaster) boxes on their website for $24.99 with a customer limit of 10. These Value boxes typically come with a manufactured relic. Now the Drama - Topps pre-sold Hobby boxes listing the details with the traditional configuration - 24 packs (12 cards per pack). However, when Topps actually sent these boxes out and how they listed them on release date, they contain just 20 packs. That is a big mis-step and even if it was done without malice, Topps should provide some form of recompense for those that pre-ordered the product due to the incorrect details.
The design is what we’ve regularly seen for Topps Flagship all year, so nothing new to discuss here. The inserts also heavily carry over from Series 1 and Series 2 with the main differentiator being a focus on the All-Star game, as usual. An interesting parallel approach for blaster/value exclusives is one that leans into the time of year for the product release as we get Halloween-focused parallels. Those are an Orange & Black foil, Jack-O’-Lantern foil, Ghost foil, Skeleton foil, Black Cat foil, Witch Hat foil, and the rarest of them all, a 1/1 Bat foil (the black, flying creature and not the wooden stick baseball players swing).
The checklist is standard fare - rookies, vets, and ex-MLB players. The rookies with base rookie cards have all been covered in my 2023 Topps Update Series: Product Preview article.
While this product may not be as bad as 2021 Topps Update Series turns out to be, this checklist isn’t great. The strength of it is with pitchers, and that’s just not something you prefer to hear with any baseball card product. I am going to guess that the aftermarket gets really bad, like 2021 Update, where Hobby boxes at one point were getting into the $50 territory. Probably not that bad, but still in that neighborhood.
2023 Panini Select Baseball
The well-loved Select brand in the football and basketball spaces is now in its fourth year of being a standalone baseball product and is scheduled to be released on Wednesday, October 11th.
There are two Hobby formats - a regular Hobby box and a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each version comes with 2 autos and 2 relic cards on average while the FOTL format has exclusive parallels for the autos, relics, and base cards. The regular Hobby boxes are being sold for $135 each by Panini with a max of one case (12 boxes) per transaction. FOTL Hobby boxes went to dutch auction on the Panini website last week with a start of $350 and a floor of $135 which I believe they hit. There will likely be retail versions of this as well - blaster boxes for sure, mega boxes perhaps.
The design is traditional Select - a full border with three different levels of rarity and design. The most common level is Concourse, the mid-level is Premier, and the rarest level is Diamond. Concourse and Premier are vertical designs while Diamond level are horizontal. The parallels are plentiful and incorporate the ever popular animal skin parallels. Autos are stickers and relics are typically player worn rather than game used. The “chase” insert with Select this year is likely to be the Color Wheel, which is always a collector favorite.
The checklist is what we’ve seen from Panini all year - prospects and ex-MLB players along with Bobby Witt, Jr. Any rookie in the product did not have MLB experience coming into 2023 and thus was outside the traditional MLBPA license, which Panini no longer has. The prospect list is impressive and includes all the big names like Jackson Holliday, Junior Caminero, Druw Jones, PCA, Jackson Merrill, Ricky Tiedemann, Marcelo Mayer, Jordan Lawlar, Brady House, Jackson Jobe, Jasson Dominguez, Elly De La Cruz, James Wood, etc.
Select is a fun product, but it rarely returns value. First Off The Line is typically the better rip because of the exclusive and lower numbered parallels, but obviously it’s more difficult to get a hold of at affordable prices. I’ve grown to like the checklist approach with Panini as well, although hitting parallels of Jim Gilliam and Hoyt Wilhelm rather than of the prospect chases is quite deflating. So while it’s fun, it’s not something I would recommend going to deep on unless you are collecting a PC player.
2023 Leaf Exotic Baseball
A new product for baseball (Leaf has already rolled this out in other sports), 2023 Leaf Exotic Baseball is scheduled to go live on Friday, October 13th, although Leaf has begun selling boxes as of Wednesday, October 11th on their website.
There is a single format - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with 3 autographed cards and that’s it - no base or inserts in the product. Leaf is currently selling boxes for $99.99 on their website.
The design is all animal prints. I didn’t think there could be a product that could have too many animal prints, but this is sure pushing that concept as far as it can go, and to some, it may be too far. We shall see how popular it ends up being. There are supposedly rare Mythical Creature cards as well that are all 1/1 redemptions (why do these have to be redemptions, Leaf?). The 14 mythical creatures are a banshee, bogeyman, chupacabra, dracula, fairies, kraken, leprechan, lochness monster, mothman, unicorn, werewolf, yeti, and zombie. Not sure how the dragon didn’t qualify for that list, but dragon parallels are found in the normal autograph sets instead of this Mythical Creature one.
The checklist is standard Leaf fare - mostly prospects, a smaller percentage of current players, and a couple of ex-MLB players. For the prospects, we get Jackson Holliday, Jordan Lawlar, Marcel Mayer, Spencer Jones, Dru Jones, Elijah Green, Jackson Churio, and others. It’s a bit surprising that this is billed as a 2023 product and they didn’t get any of the Draft guys into it. For current players, we have Ronald Acuña Jr., Juan Soto, Vladdy Jr., Elly De La Cruz, Corbin Carroll, Anthony Volpe, Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Seiya Suzuki, Oneil Cruz, Jordan Walker, Fernando Tatis, Jr., etc. For ex-players we get Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Rickey Henderson, Don Mattingly, Frank Thomas, Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Mariano Rivera, Mike Schmidt, Nolan Ryan, and more. The active and ex-MLB player checklists have been getting better with Leaf which is nice to see.
I’ve had a hard time with Leaf products in the past few years as they continue to lower the bar on what they do, how they do it, and the amount of product they push out now. This is just another drop in that bucket. It looks like it could be fun and the price isn’t egregious, but it simply feels like another product from them that no one was asking for.
2023 Bowman Platinum
The retail only product that is heavily prospect focused, 2023 Bowman Platinum is scheduled to hit retail shelves on Friday, October 13th. As usual with retail products, these have already been showing up on shelves and in the aftermarket. No checklist has been published and it usually takes a while for one to appear. That may pop up if Topps sells Monster boxes on their website like they did last year for $80 each. The design is hard to describe - kinda wavy, watery distortion design. I don’t know what it is, but every year Bowman Platinum’s design is one of my least favorite and they somehow did it again this year. ***Update - Walmart is selling blaster boxes for $24.98 and Monster boxes for $89.98 on their website on the evening of Wednesday, October 11th.
***Update - Topps is selling Monster boxes for $99.99 with a customer limit of 4 boxes per customer.
2023 Topps Stadium Club delay and pre-order cancellations
2023 Topps Stadium Club was on the release calendar for October 18th. Topps pre-sold Hobby boxes for $109.99 with a customer limit of 2 boxes back on Thursday, September 21st. On Tuesday, October 10th, Topps sent out emails to pre-order purchasers that they were refunding those orders and providing a $35 Topps website credit. The reason for the order cancellation was due to quality control issues that they did not specify. Topps also delayed the release until the first quarter of 2024 for what we have to assume were these quality control issues.
I wish Topps would have gone the extra mile to offer the pre-order purchasers the ability to choose whether they wanted to keep their pre-orders given the delay. I understand the simplest thing to do is to do a blanket refund and credit, but now those buyers will have to order the product through other avenues or wait until Topps goes live with it on release day, if they even do. If they do, I really hope they keep the pre-order price rather than bump it $10 like they often do with products that have pre-orders in this price range.
2023 Topps Holiday
Surprisingly 2023 Topps Holiday showed up on the Walmart website for pre-order on Wednesday, October 11th. Boxes are selling for $29.92 and they promise one relic or auto per box plus five metallic parallels and one oversized die cut ornament card. No word yet on the actual release/delivery date.