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 Panini Immaculate Baseball. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an online release from Topps of 2023 Topps Chrome Logofractor Edition, but we shall see. ***Update - 2023 Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition is going live on Tuesday, September 5th for Topps 582 Montgomery Club members.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Panini Immaculate Baseball
The mid-tier product in its first year without any license is scheduled to release on Friday, September 8th.
There are two configurations - a regular Hobby box and a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each box comes with 6 cards, all hits - 4 autos and 2 relics on average. FOTL comes with one low numbered exclusive auto and one low numbered exclusive relic out of the 6 hits. Supposedly there are numbered base cards but I don’t recall seeing any of these show up last year, so if they do pop up, they are definitely short printed. FOTL boxes went to Dutch Auction on the Panini website last Thursday with a starting point of $700 and a floor of $300. This flew completely under the radar for me, so unfortunately I missed where it ended, but I imagine it was close to the floor - if anyone knows where it ended, hit me up and I will update this blurb. Regular Hobby boxes will be sold on Panini’s website on Friday - price TBA. Last year Panini sold these boxes for $339.99. Currently Blowout is selling them for $379.95. ***Update - Panini is selling regular Hobby boxes for $369.95.
The design is almost identical to 2022 - I’m guessing they are running out of staff to come up with new ideas and have decided to simply recycle designs whenever possible. However, the box color is different, so yay? Immaculate relics can be really fun and is one of the major draws in my opinion. However, be aware that the relics are a mix of game-used and player-used, with player-used being significantly less desirable. In addition, the majority of cards are thick stock of one sort or another - it’s nice because it feels like quality, but it’s not nice because there are often quality issues due to the thick stock giving more opportunity for production flaws to occur. Finally, autos tend to be a mixture of stickers and on-card - as always, we’ll see if Panini goes full sticker with this product or not.
The checklist has gone the route of all the 2023 Panini baseball products - almost all ex-MLB players and prospects*. Any active player outside of Bobby Witt Jr. that is currently an MLB player was either a prospect or not in an MLB organization last year (Masataka Yoshida for example). A lot of prospect chases are in the product like Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, Junior Caminero, Jasson Dominguez, Jordan Walker, and many, many others. There are a ton of ex-MLB players from the recently retired to the players from the days of yore. Most of those are going to be ho-hum type of hits, but there will still be interesting, fun, and sometimes valuable hits along the lines of Ken Griffey Jr. and Babe Ruth.
I’ve been a fan of Immaculate as a case break and aftermarket singles product. Buying personal boxes and getting into single box breaks can be pretty rough given the price point and having the odds against you. I’ve liked this product in the past and will still be interested given the prospect part of the checklist, but it’s not something I will go out of my way for. And lacking almost all the active MLB players is likely going to turn off a fair bit of collectors.
2023 Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition
Topps sent out emails to current 582 Montgomery Club members yesterday evening (Monday, September 4th) that they would get access to pre-order 2023 Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition boxes. No checklist, no time, no price, nor customer limits were communicated. Last year Topps skipped the Montgomery Club on this product and released it straight to the public at $250 a box. Given the box image from Topps, it looks to mirror the new format from last year with two parallels and no autographs. This blurb will be updated throughout the week with info as it becomes available. ***Update - the price point is a discount off of last year, coming in at $219.99 with a customer limit of two boxes per customer.
****Update - Topps will be selling boxes to the general public on Wednesday, September 6th through a raffle system partnering with EQL. They’ve used it in the recent past for a couple of non-baseball releases - this will be the first time it will be used in a baseball release.
*****Update - the Raffle went live as scheduled at 2 PM Eastern Time, but the price point went up $10 from the Montgomery Club pricing at $229.99