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 one scheduled release - 2024 Leaf Lumber - plus one product that looks like it is finally popping up in collector’s hands - 2024 Pulse Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Leaf Lumber
The relic-focused, unlicensed product released on Friday, June 28th.
There are two Hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and an Emerald Edition Hobby box. Each box comes with four cards. Mostly I see the breakdown as three relics and one auto, although I will occasionally see boxes with two autos and two relics, sometimes with one of those autos being a cut-auto. The main selling point of Emerald Edition is that all four cards will be numbered out of 4 or less. Leaf was selling Emerald Edition for $249.99 per box. Leaf did not sell regular Hobby boxes directly from their website - most secondary market sellers have been selling boxes between $200 - $250. There are no retail formats.
The design is all about the wood bat relics. From small squares of bats to bat nameplates to bat knobs. It appears as most if not all of the wood bat relics are game-used, which is nice. The Grain Assault cards are a full wood faced card with a sticker on it - a nice card, even if it is sticker autos (it’s Leaf, it’s almost all sticker autos for them nowadays). The Stealing Signs cards look to be the main one that don’t include any sort of bat relic - it was as if Leaf had more stickers than bats to use for the product. Potentially the only auto in a box could come without the main theme of the product feels like a bit of a disappointment. Some cards will feature an image of the player, more than likely because Leaf has some sort of NIL deal with them. Other cards will only show the jersey of the player because Leaf likely does not have any NIL type of arrangement with them. No cards will designate a team or city, so the photos/jerseys are what you hopefully can determine the team the card belongs to when it comes to breaks. Seriously, this product is a breaker nightmare.
The checklist is heavy on ex-MLB players - like 90% or more come from former players. Current players are few and far between - Ronald Acuña Jr., Aaron Judge, Michael Harris II, Elly De La Cruz, Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto, Mike Trout, and Yordan Alvarez being the main active players in the checklist. Prepare to hit cards of players that you may never have heard of if you’re not schooled up on the history of baseball.
This is one of the cheapest opportunities to hunt bat nameplates and bat knobs given its unlicensed nature. That is the main highlight for me, and the only thing that drives any sort of interest. Beyond that, it’s hard to get excited about the product. Bat lumber relics feel like a dime a dozen type of stuff. Not exactly as prevalent as jersey swatches, they still don’t sell as well as you would expect if you were new to the baseball card collecting hobby. I’ve essentially stayed away from this product since it switched to the Lumber format - it used to be Leaf Leather & Lumber. The lack of value, the ex-MLB player heavy checklist, the sticker autos, and an uninteresting design (not really much you can do given the theme of the product, but I still feel like there is more that should be done) are all reasons I’m simply out on Leaf Lumber year after year.
2024 Pulse Baseball
A new product to the scene, 2024 Pulse Baseball was never officially given a release date, but it started to show up on the market this week.
There is only one format that is available on their website - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with three autos, two base cards, and two base parallels on average. There are insert cards that can be pulled as well, with the assumption that they are replacing the base cards. They are guaranteeing that you will hit at least one Evan Carter (the cover boy) or Junior Caminero auto per case (10 boxes per case). They are selling Hobby boxes for $81.99 and cases for $819.99 on their website. I’ve seen boxes for as cheap as $63 in the aftermarket, and wouldn’t be surprised if they end up even cheaper.
The design is a basic as it can be - a full border for the autos with a name cut-out at the bottom. The base adds a triangular design in the bottom left with what looks to be the player’s jersey number - it’s really distracting to be honest. The Ablaze insert looks good - I’d like to see the cards in hand to be sure though. The cards look to be on thick stock with a sort of glossy finish to them. All autos are on-card.
The checklist is almost exclusively prospects, with one pre-draft prospect in Ethan Petry, and three active MLB players that debuted prior to 2024 with Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, and Noelvi Marte. Many stronger prospect names including James Wood, Aidan Miller, Coby Mayo, Samuel Basallo, Spencer Jones, and Leo De Vries.
As my Local Card Pod co-host succinctly put it in the Prospects Live discord, this is like Leaf and Onyx had a baby. I think the argument can be made it’s more like Onyx, but essentially he’s hit the nail on the head. It’s another competitor in the unlicensed baseball space with a focus on prospects as you don’t have the MLBPA complications, nor the complications of these guys having enough money where the paltry sums card manufacturers offer are worth their time to sign hundreds to thousands of cards. It’s a saturated space in a marketplace trending down and it’s going to be really hard to stand out. If you don’t stand out, then you aren’t likely to make it. But maybe there’s more to it that means the eye, or simply that Pulse will be able to survive or even thrive despite the factors stacked against them.