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 Finest Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
***Update with 2023 Topps Allen & Ginter pre-sale drop on Wednesday, July 5th.
***Update for Topps 206 Low Series going live on Thursday, July 6th.
2023 Topps Finest Baseball
A mid-tier release, 2023 Topps Finest Baseball is scheduled to release on Friday, July 7th.
There is just one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with two mini-boxes, so you also hear a Hobby box referred to as a “Master Box”. Each mini-box contains one guaranteed auto for a total of two autos per Hobby box. Currently Hobby boxes are selling for around $220. Last year’s product, which released in January of this year, sold on the Topps website for $219.99 with a customer limit of 4 Hobby boxes and cases for $1,669.99 with a customer limit of 1 case. ***Update - Topps is selling on their website Hobby boxes for $234.99 with a customer limit of 4 and cases (8 boxes per case) for $1,949.99 with a customer limit of 2.
The design is typical Finest - very busy with no border featuring a shot of the player and no live background, but rather a bunch of design elements all on chrome stock. Inserts can be interesting and the main one I like is celebrating the players in the World Baseball Classic with an old NBA Finest design as the background - essentially the country flag overlaid on a portion of the globe. Various other inserts with short or long odds including a Rookies insert and autographed buybacks will generate some level of interest.
The checklist is mostly rookies and current MLB players with a sprinkling of ex-MLB players. The majority of the 2023 rookie chases so far are present in the product with either a base, auto, or both - Adley Rutschman, Anthony Volpe, Corbin Carroll, Jordan Walker, Josh Jung, Kodai Senga, Masataka Yoshida, Michael Harris II, Vinnie Pasquantino, Francisco Álvarez, Brett Baty, Nolan Gorman, and Gunnar Henderson.
Back 5 years ago or so, this product could be picked up for less than $150, and at that price, it was a solid rip. However, once it got past that point, it became a lot harder to swallow. As a second tier product, a few weeks out from release is usually when singles prices take a nosedive. So getting in at box ripping prices is largely a losing proposition. On the other hand, the strength of the rookie class in this checklist is enticing. Targeting mis-priced Pick Your Team (PYT) breaks is probably a decent strategy here if you focus on the rookie auto checklist. For me, though, it’s mostly been a product to avoid over the last few years.
2023 Topps Allen & Ginter
On Wednesday, July 5th, Topps dropped pre-sales of 2023 Topps Allen & Ginter hobby boxes. The pre-order price is $114.99 per Hobby box with a customer limit of 4 boxes. No change to the format as it is three hits which can be relics and/or autos, with the odds typically heavily weighted towards relics. No blaster boxes are posted for pre-sale, although there will assuredly be all of the standard A&G retail formats at release. The release date is currently scheduled for August 2nd. There is not a checklist as of now. Last year Topps sold Hobby boxes on their website for $119.99, and with the pattern of pre-sale prices being slightly lower than release date prices, it likely lands at $120 again.
2023 Topps 206 Low Series
Copy and Paste from last weeks This Week in Baseball Cards below, plus additional details about the release day prices.
In years past, Topps has sold this in Waves and sold them for $14.99 per box (pack). No autos have been guaranteed in the past, and I don’t anticipate that changing. At the very least, there seems to be some form of change with the move to a “Low Series” versus a Wave format. That implies that perhaps we are getting two releases rather than the 5 or more with the Wave approach.
***Update - As promised, this went on sale on the Topps website on Thursday, 6/29 and sold out within a few hours. The price was $54.99 per box with a limit of 10 per purchase (not per customer). There are a ton of variations that I won’t get into. The main chase, autos, are now 1 in 3 boxes and come with 40 cards per box instead of 10 last year. I couldn’t find the odds on autos, but they were pretty long and were just 3 to 4 signers per wave, with the exception of Wave 1, which did not include autographs. Last year’s autos were not hobby-desirable players, which further lessened the interest in the product. They’ve done better this year, although of the 24 signers, probably 4 at this point are given you any hope of an ROI - Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Gunnar Henderson, Masataka Yoshida, and Brett Baty.
Topps went live with this product on Thursday, July 6th. They are selling single boxes, the same as they pre-sold last week, at $54.99 with a per purchase limit of 50 boxes (5x more than the pre-sale). They are also selling 5 box bundles for $259.99, basically a $15 discount, with a per purchase limit of 10 bundles.