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 is one scheduled release - 2023 Topps Tribute Baseball. In addition, 2023 Panini Prizm 1st Off The Line (FOTL) will be going the Dutch Auction route this week in preparation for the release next week.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Tribute Baseball
One of the more popular mid-tier releases, 2023 Topps Tribute Baseball is scheduled to release on Wednesday, July 12th.
There is only a single format - a regular Hobby box. Each box comes with 6 hits - 3 auto/auto-relics and 3 relic cards. With 6 packs, that’s one hit per pack, plus the two base cards per pack. As a reminder, never buy these packs loose. More than likely, Topps will collate the packs so that the packs with the autos are easily determined which of the 6 packs you will find them in, and then the relic packs will be sold off by potentially unscrupulous sellers (unless they specify that they are relic packs). Topps did a pre-sale back on May 26th for Hobby boxes and cases. As I was out on vacation, I missed the case prices and the customer limits, but the Hobby boxes were pre-selling for $425. Currently boxes are going for $500 on blowout. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $479.99 with a customer limit of 4 and Cases (6 Hobby boxes per case) for $2,799.99 with a customer limit of 2.
The design for the base is typical Tribute - a full border setup with the base and a sort of hourglass shape for the internal player photo. Gold internal lines, whites, grays, blacks, and orange-ish browns. Ultimately the base and base auto designs are “whatever”. The more interesting stuff comes with the non-base autos and relics. As usual, they are doing the Stamp of Approval relics, which come with an MLB authentication sticker and code from the game where that jersey was used by that player. It’s a nice touch, although in some circumstances they make mistakes with that. In the past few years, they’ve done some insert autos that have highlighted a player and the stadium, which I’ve found really cool. This year, it seems they are moving on to a Nickname focused version, which I also like, but still prefer the stadium-based versions. The Olympus autos they also include in the sell sheet don’t really do it for me.
The checklist for Tribute is very heavy on current MLB vets, ex-players, and a sprinkling of rookies. It’s a 100 card base set with the first 90 cards being vets and ex-players and the final 10 cards being short printed rookies. These rookies are Adley Rutschman, Riley Greene, Michael Harris II, Brett Baty, Triston Casas, Gabriel Moreno, Corbin Carroll, Oswald Peraza, Gunnar Henderson, and Francisco Álvarez. Altogether not a bad list. The short printed rookies are 1 in 18 packs, so one in every three boxes, or two per case. In years past sometimes these rookie short prints will be in addition to the two base cards in a pack, which isn’t great as that also allows unscrupulous sellers to pack search and keep those for themselves. For the autos, there are a lot more rookies beyond the above base short print guys, who all have autos as well. Anthony Volpe, Josh Jung, Jordan Walker, Nolan Gorman, and Vinnie Pasquantino highlight the rookies with autos but no base cards, but the list is quite extensive.
Topps Tribute has always been popular, but the 2020 version really cemented it’s place in the hobby as that was one of the first products to come out after the massive delays with the pandemic shutdowns. Collectors were thirsty for products, and Tribute slaked quite a bit of that demand. As such, the prices over the past few years reflected that newfound fan-base. And it priced out a lot of the older fans, including myself. In addition, a lot of the hits don’t sell great in the long term outside of a few elite rookies and vets. Most of the ex-MLB players also don’t sell well outside of the more favored inserts, cut autos, and the Ohtani 1/1’s (there are 15 in this product). I have unfortunately passed on Tribute for the past few years and don’t see that changing this year.
2023 Panini Prizm 1st Off The Line (FOTL) Dutch Auction
2023 Panini Prizm will be released next week and I will dig into the details in next week’s post for This Week in Baseball Cards. Panini is doing a 1st Off The Line version which they will be selling through a Dutch Auction on Tuesday, July 11th at noon eastern time. The starting price will be $350 with a floor of $135, which it likely reaches. ***Update - from general reports it seems like it sold out at $188 (as usual, Panini doesn’t refresh these auctions appropriately, so it’s always hard to tell when it sells out if you are not regularly refreshing and/or attempting to buy)