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 - 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. ***2024 Fyre Ballgame Relics Baseball is a new company/product releasing this week as well, but it appears to be purely a repack product and generally I avoid covering (and buying) repack products.
*****Update for 2024 Bowman Sapphire pre-order.
*****Update for 2024 Bowman Mega Box release.
2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball
The amateur focused product for players who have played for Team USA past and present is scheduled to release on Wednesday, May 29th. ***Update - Panini has delayed the release, currently scheduled for June 26th. ******Update - Hobby boxes finally went live on Friday, July 5th.
There are two Hobby configurations currently listed by Panini - a regular Hobby box and an H2 Hobby box. The regular Hobby box is the traditional format we see every year with 7 hits per box, split between autos and relics. In years past, that split tended to favor autos 4 to 3 or 5 to 2 in my experience. H2 Hobby boxes are more of a Monster box format and I don’t recall Panini using the H2 terminology previously for this product. I’m guessing this is what you will see on retail shelves, and it comes with three hits - two autos and one relic on average according to Panini. Last year Panini sold Hobby boxes for $75 on their website, but did not sell the retail format. That retail format was selling for around $45. This year, Panini has both Hobby and H2 listed on their website in their “coming soon” products. ***Update - the Hobby version went on sale on Friday at $100 per box. The H2 version is currently scheduled for Wednesday, July 17th.
The design is typical Stars & Stripes - leaning very heavily into the blues and whites with red highlights, giving us a lot of stars and stripes/USA flag themes. Thank goodness they ditched that green theme they decided to do a few years back. Almost all if not all autos will be stickers - the only exception in the past tends to be with the alumni autos, but without a checklist, it’s hard to know if those will be present or not (they were not last year). Memorabilia can be a mix of player worn and game worn, so it’s worth paying attention to. Game worn in my experience is usually found more often with the younger players. Kabooms return for the main insert - with the chase players, these can get into the couple of hundred dollars in value, and with the non-chase players, these tend to go in the sub-$100 range, so if you do like Kabooms, this is a potential place to get them.
The checklist is not yet out - no surprise from Panini as they care less and less about their baseball products. It likely will run the gamut from the youngest players in their early teens all the way through the college bats in their early twenties. The marketing material includes prep chases Ethan Holliday and Konnor Griffin while the college chases include Charlie Condon, Hagen Smith, Braden Montgomery, Brody Brecht, Jac Caglianone, Seaver King, and JJ Wetherholt.
One of my favorite products every year as I am a sucker for national team cards, and this is an entire product of them. In addition, getting early shots at some of the biggest future prospect chases is fun AND valuable. These cards often sell really well for the big names, especially when they have yet to receive their 1st Bowman cards. Add in a very palatable price point and it’s worth ripping a box or two on your own. FYI - this is a tough product to break unless it’s pack breaks, so you won’t find many of them.
2024 Bowman Sapphire Pre-Order
Topps sent out emails to its 582 Montgomery Club Members that 2024 Bowman Sapphire would be available to them for pre-order on Tuesday at 12 PM EST. At the moment the price-point has not been announced. There is a max of one box per Montgomery Club membership. Just like last year, each box comes with one auto and three parallels per box. Last year Topps tried to run this as a Dutch Auction and it was an absolute mess, and Topps basically has not done many, if any, of these since. Given that this appears to be a straight pre-order for the 582 members, it stands to reason that the full release (probably Wednesday) should also be a standard pre-order. The Dutch Auction last year started at $850 with a floor of $350. We’ll see come Tuesday what the price point is. ***Update - 582 Montgomery Club member price is $429.99 per box. It remains to be seen if/when this goes live to the general public if this will be the same price at that point, or if Topps will bump it up. The auto checklist includes most of the chase names with Dylan Crews, Walker Jenkins, Arjun Nimmala, Goerge Lombard Jr., Cooper Pratt, Brock Wilken, Aidan Miller, Kyle Teel, etc. The only two rookie autos are Junior Caminero and Pete Crow-Armstrong. At the moment, for non-auto rookies it looks like we add in Elly De La Cruz, Noelvi Marte, and Marco Luciano. Strangely no Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who I thought would have been a lock to include here. This will be updated as more information trickles out and if/when it goes on sale for the general public.
*****Update - the sale to the general public is scheduled for Wednesday, June 5th with Topps stating the price will remain the same as what 582 members paid - $429.99 per box.
********Update - the sale went live as expected and instantly sold out - $429.99 per box and cases (10 boxes per case) at zero discount, priced at $4,299.99 per case.
2024 Bowman Mega Box
The retail Mega Box version of 2024 Bowman released on Wednesday, May 29th. This gets it’s own little blurb as it tends to be treated a bit differently than a standard retail configuration. That’s because it comes with 10 exclusive mega box chrome parallels - essentially the mojo/choice pattern. The rest of the cards in the product are base, or as Topps is now calling them, bulk cards (that’s a problem for discussion another day). There are mega box autographs and they fall about 1 to 2 per case from what I’ve seen (20 boxes per case). While the mega box exclusive cards will carry the 1st Bowman logo, the mega box autos will not as Topps uses different photos than the players’ photos from their 1st Bowman cards. This significantly lessens their value, even for the players who have their 1st Bowman in the full 2024 Bowman release. Autos are on card, so even though you don’t get the 1st Bowman logo, at least you get the on card ink. The checklist is a slimmed down version of the 2024 Bowman checklist, so make sure to check and see if the prospect(s) you’re chasing are in it either in base and/or auto forms. Topps is selling boxes for the usual price of the past few years - $44.99.