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 are two scheduled releases - 2023 Leaf Vivid Baseball and 2024 Topps Sterling Baseball. We also got a 2024 Bowman Baseball tease from Topps on Monday, April 1st (and it’s not an April Fools joke!).
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Leaf Vivid Baseball
Back for its second year, 2023 Leaf Vivid Baseball is scheduled to release on Friday, April 5th. On the Leaf website, they list the release date as last week on Friday, March 29th. However, the major retailers (Blowout, DA Card World, Steel City) are all pre-selling boxes with a release date of April 5th. More than likely Leaf just did not update their website for a delayed release date.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Leaf has changed up the configuration from 6 autographs on average per box to 5 autographs on average plus two non-auto (base) cards. I suppose this product sold well enough that Leaf decided to go the old base card route as a way to extend the print run. Last year Leaf sold these boxes for $144.99. Currently Blowout is selling Hobby boxes for $180.
The design is more of what we saw last year - VIVID! Hopefully you love highlighters and graffiti and the 80’s colors with 70’s designs. It’s a kitchen sink of the brightest possible colors with the loudest designs. You’ll also find an Anime-inspired subset which will often find quite a few fans, even with it being Leaf. As is the case pretty much always now with Leaf, all of the autos are going to be stickers.
The checklist is what we’ve seen across 2023 Leaf products, with a shift towards a much more even mixture of prospects and ex-MLB players while also including more than just the token active MLB player. As we saw last year with this product, Charlie Sheen gets in the product, presumably as a the Wild Thing persona from the Major League movies. We also get some of the more unsavory former MLB players with the likes of Pete Rose and Lenny Dykstra, and depending on how you feel about the steroid mess, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa. On the plus side, former MLB players like Sandy Koufax, Stan Musial, Ichiro, and Cal Ripken Jr. can be found in limited quantities. Current MLB players like Mookie Betts (who has apparently signed a decent amount of stickers for Leaf), Shohei Ohtani, Seiya Suzuki, Elly De La Cruz, Oneil Cruz, Michael Harris II, Nolan Schanuel, Jackson Chourio (who just debuted), and Evan Cater are also in the product. Prospects still do make up a large percentage of the checklist and include pre-draft and brother of the top overall prospect, Ethan Holliday. Ethan was originally in 2023 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball last year (base and autos), a 2023 Bowman Baseball Factory All-Star game collaboration (base only), and a Leaf Metal St. Patrick’s Day multi-sport product released a few weeks ago (autos only). The other pre-draft prospects of note are Tommy (Tommy Tanks) White, Nick Kurtz, Vance Honeycutt, and Travis Bazzana. Current MLB prospects include Paul Skenes, Colt Emerson, Junior Caminero, Roman Anthony, and a slew of others - worth looking at the checklist to see if any of your targets are there or not.
I did not get any of this product in its inaugural release of the 2022 product year - the sticker autos and the highlighter theme isn’t my cup of tea. However, I think there is a place here for the product for people who do like the bright and over the top designs. I wouldn’t be buying sealed wax and ripping, but I could see picking up your guys in the secondary market if you do like the look of the product.
2024 Topps Sterling Baseball
The high-end release is scheduled to release on Wednesday, April 3rd.
There is only one configuration - a regular Hobby box which maintains the same format as years past. Each Hobby box comes with two mini-boxes, each containing one card. One of those cards is guaranteed to contain an auto and the second card can be an auto relic or a 1/1 relic like a bat knob, bat nameplate, etc. Last year Topps sold boxes for $999.99 which was $150 jump from 2022. This year you can find boxes pre-sale at online retailers around $1,200.
The design is what it is - a high end look to it with lots of white/silver/gray going on for the base. But it doesn’t really lend any added kick to the product - that’s all from the price point itself. I will say that the small relics aren’t my thing, and you find that a lot with this product. On top of that, the majority of relics aren’t guaranteed in any way from any specific game, event, or season. That’s all we get from Topps on the relics, so buyer beware if you are looking for game-used relics from that player. The 1/1 relics are potentially something that can be traced back to the players though. All autos are on card although there are cut autos, so those are “kind-of on card”.
The checklist is yet to be released. It’s a 2024 product, so we should see the early 2024 rookie class here headlined by Elly De La Cruz. Ohtani as a Dodger is the only other thing we can glean from the marketing material.
The $500+ price point per card from Topps is relatively ridiculous in my opinion, so this is a product I avoid. It’s a high risk gamble and if you are playing int he space of Topps Dynasty and Topps Transcendent, then this is another product to consider. Otherwise, it’s the singles market to perhaps buy something a lot cheaper that the price paid to open a box.
2024 Bowman Baseball
Topps dropped the release date and some new card images on their social media for 2024 Bowman Baseball on April 1st, 2024. The release date is scheduled for May 8th. Added 1st Bowman players that we see are Dylan Crews and Arjun Nimmala. This is added to the list of Brock Wilken, Walker Jenkins, and George Lombard Jr. previously teased by Topps. I anticipate that we will see a pre-sale of 2024 Bowman Baseball either this week or next. Hopefully a checklist comes along with that. ***Update - Topps pre-sale went live with Hobby boxes (1 auto) at $259.99 and Cases of Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) for $3,119.88. HTA Jumbo boxes (3 autos) went live for $499.99 and Cases of HTA Jumbos boxes (8 boxes per case) for $3,999.92.