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 - 2024 Topps Museum Collection Baseball and 2024 Topps Spotlight Baseball by Andy Friedman.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Museum Collection Baseball
The mid-tier product is scheduled to release on Wednesday, July 31st.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with four hits - two autos and two relics. One of the two autos will be a relic auto, and most of the time those end up being sticker autos. Relics are quite often get the dreaded not from any game, event, or season designation. At least one exception will be MLB Authenticated relic autos which should come one per case. They will have the sticker on the relic where you can look up the game the relic came from. The other popular case hit will be a framed auto, typically a metal frame with the exception of the 1/1, which are wood frames. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe Topps pre-sold Hobby boxes for $389.99 (at the very least to Montgomery Club members). Currently Blowout is selling boxes for $429.95. Last year Topps sold boxes for $399.99 after pre-selling them for $374.99. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $399.99 and cases of Hobby boxes for $4,799.99.
The design isn’t really a big driver of interest in the product. The one base card image we have is hard to tell if it is a parallel or a blue parallel of some sort. Regardless, it’s supposed to give a higher end feel, but really it’s not the main attraction of the card. A black full border base card, if that is what we get, could cause quality issues to show a lot easier on the paper stock. Atelier booklets are back again, which I’m always a fan of. These are booklets that show the home stadium across the interior of the booklet with a large player photo overlaid on one side of the book and the player’s signature on the other side of the book. As said above, framed autos are also another really popular feature of the product. As they are case hits, you will want to make sure you trust your source if you’re buying sealed boxes (and not a sealed case) - I’m not sure if there will be a weight difference between boxes, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
The checklist is a mixture of rookies, vets, and ex-MLB or Negro League players. The rookie chases include all of them we’ve been after all year as well as a bonus chase - this looks to be the first officially licensed, packed out product with a rookie card of Paul Skenes. It will only be base cards (and it’s associated parallels). There will not be any relics or autos of Skenes in the product. He has had officially licensed rookie cards with Topps, but they’ve all been Topps Now cards to my knowledge, and base only as well. The other rookie chases are Elly De La Cruz, Jasson Dominguez, Jackson Holiday, Jackson Chourio, Jackson Merrill, Junior Caminero, Wyatt Langford, Evan Cater, Shota Imanaga, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Jung Hoo Lee. Occasionally I will feel bad for team collectors of certain teams in certain products, and with this product, it’s definitely the Marlins. While there are a few cards from Eury Perez, Ichiro, and Miguel Cabrera in the checklist, the two players that comprise the majority of Marlins cards were both recently traded away from the team - Luis Arraez and Jazz Chisholm Jr.
I like Museum Collection - it’s in the conversation with Topps Tribute when it comes to my favorite mid-tier Topps baseball products. The framed autos are great, the short base checklist - just 100 cards, and the Atelier Autographs are all great features. Unfortunately, like most products, the prices have far exceeded the value when buying and ripping sealed boxes. At best, this is a breaking product, and ideally you can just go for the singles market if you’re not chasing the biggest names.
2024 Topps Spotlight Baseball by Andy Friedman
Back for a third time with a new approach to product configuration, 2024 Topps Spotlight Baseball by Andy Friedman is scheduled to release on Tuesday, July 30th.
There are two configurations - a Collectors Edition box, essentially a Hobby box, and a basic box (Topps has not yet detailed what they are calling the non-Collectors Edition box). The Collectors Edition box guarantees one auto per box and one encased, very low numbered parallel OR an original 1/1 art card, with 12 packs per box. The basic box comes with 4 packs per box and does not guarantee any hits, although the box info says that it’s possible to pull an auto from those boxes. Each pack from either configuration should have either a parallel, short print, or auto. In 2021 and 2022, this product was sold as a single box with 9 cards for $19.99 per box with no guaranteed autos - just the similar one parallel, short print, or auto per pack/box. At this point, Topps has not released any details on pricing of either format. ***Update - Basic boxes (still no name given by Topps that I saw) were sold for $49.99 with odds given as one in three boxes containing an autograph. Collector’s Edition boxes were sold for $169.99 and cases of Collector’s Edition boxes (10 boxes per case) were $1,599.99.
The design is like what we’ve seen in the past - cards of the past re-done in the style of Andy Friedman - essentially an ink and watercolor approach. The cards are all from Topps cards, some from 2024, and some going back at least to the 1970’s.
The checklist has yet to be released. We’ve seen teased images of Elly De La Cruz rookie card, Juan Soto, Ricky Henderson rookie card, George Brett rookie card, two different Derek Jeter cards including his rookie card, and a Bryce Harper card. There was a promotional Jose Ramirez card available at the National Sports Card Convention, but it’s unknown if he will end up in the full release or not. ***Update - as far as I could see, no checklist was released when boxes went on sale, although we did get new marketing images. In addition to the cards above, we Cal Ripken, Greg Maddux, Shohei Ohtani, Jasson Dominguez, and Evan Carter cards, with Ohtani, Jasson, and Carter having autographs.
This product flew under the radar back in 2021/2022, although the art card market was still not fully done and dusted. The folks still into the Project 2020/70/100 cards were definitely one of the target markets for this product. Andy Friedman has had his art in various major publications like Rolling Stones, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, so he’s not completely unfamiliar outside of the trading card world. On the other hand, he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, so while that’s not the best barometer of fame, I would expect a well-known artist to have one. We’ll have to wait and see on the checklist and the price to really get a good idea of how desirable this product will be, but I’m guessing that will be the primary driver, as opposed to the product itself and notoriety of the artist.