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 Finest Baseball and 2023 Leaf Trinity Baseball. Leaf product release dates are highly unreliable, so more info to be added if/when this product drops. ***Update - Confirmed that 2023 Leaf Trinity Baseball did in fact go live on Wednesday, August 7th.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Finest Baseball
The mid-tier, shiny product that was one of the very first high-end products starting in 1993 releases on Wednesday, August 7th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. While the packaging/setup has changed for 2024, the amount of cards and hits per box has not. There are two guaranteed autos per box and there are still 60 cards per box. The setup change is that there are no longer two separate mini-boxes of six packs (containing 5 cards per pack). It is now a standard box with no separate mini-boxes - and it’s gone to just six packs total, but each pack now contains 10 cards, maintaining the 60 card per box total. Topps did a pre-order in July with Hobby boxes selling for $249.99 and cases of Hobby boxes (8 boxes per case) selling for $1,999.99. Topps has said that they are going to be selling Hobby boxes on the release date for $249.99. Last year Topps sold Hobby boxes for $234.99 and cases of Hobby boxes for $1,949.99. There are no retail formats of this product. ***Update - as scheduled, Finest went on sale on the Topps website with Hobby boxes listed for $249.99. Cases sold out in less than 15 minutes, but it looks like they were listed for $1,999.99 (I didn’t catch the listing until after it sold out).
The design is standard fare from Finest. Player-focused with no live background, but rather a background full of design elements. This year, it is very impressionistic digital art style. A hint of a border with the artistic effects interacting with it also plays into the design. I like it, but it doesn’t move the needle. Various inserts are included of varying degrees of commonality and rarity. There is an original 1993 design insert that likely will be popular, but with two per box, they will be pretty common. The Fiesta insert is one of the rarer inserts and is an attempt at having some fun, but it feels like they should have taken it even further. The Let’s Go insert is one of the rarest insert pulls in Topps Chrome and finds its way into Finest as well as a rare pull, although not as rare as it is in Chrome. Autos should all be on card.
The checklist has also undergone an overhaul. We know get a 300 card checklist instead of a 150 card checklist, and it’s tiered into 3 levels of commonality to rarity. Strangely they’ve taken the approach of having players repeated in the base checklist. For example, Shota Imanaga has three base rookie cards - one for each tier (Common, Uncommon, Rare). The rookie chases are almost all there with the exception of Paul Skenes, which we saw for the first time in a packed out product last week with Museum Collection. I expect this may be one of the last products without Skenes in it. Rookies that are in the product include Jordan Lawlar, Jackson Holliday, Shota Imanaga, Elly De La Cruz, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jackson Chourio, Jasson Dominguez, Jacskon Merrill, Jung Hoo Lee, Junior Caminero, Evan Carter, and Wyatt Langford.
Topps Finest holds a special, nostalgic place within the Hobby, and because of that, will always hold some value. Chrome stock, on card autos, a strong rookie class, and not much competition from other baseball products should all lead to this being a hot product on release. In the long run, Finest, like most mid-tier products, doesn’t hold up that well in the singles market. So the play is to sell as soon as possible for sellers, and for singles buyers, to wait a month or so and then start grabbing whoever you PC. Even though I don’t mind Finest, it’s not really anything I go out of my way for, so I won’t be doing much other than bargain hunting some singles. Given that box prices are $250, I wouldn’t recommend doing much other than that or hopping in a few breaks before moving on to whatever the next products in the pipeline happen to be.
2023 Leaf Trinity Baseball
Originally scheduled for July, one of the more popular Leaf Baseball products, Leaf Trinity is currently scheduled to be released on Wednesday, August 7th. ***Update - The product did in fact go live on Wednesday, August 7th.
Given it’s Leaf, release dates are almost always not to believed until we have multiple confirmations of ship dates and/or Leaf posting about it on their accounts/website. Also there’s not much info other than the marketing sheets, as seems to be the usual case with packed out Leaf products. Currently regular Hobby boxes are going for around $160 with the major secondary retailers. The checklist is not available as of writing - marketing material teases Mookie Betts, Nolan Ryan, Paul Skenes, Junior Caminero, Roman Anthony, Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, Mike Piazza, Ethan Salas, Dylan Crews, Tony Perez, Barry Larkin, and Elly De La Cruz. Autos are likely to all be stickers, and one of the most popular features of the product, the patches, are likely not to have any link to the player themselves (not game worn, player worn, or from any specified event). More info to come as it’s made known.
***Update - with the release going live and the checklist released, additional details of interest are for the checklist we have Cal Ripken Jr., Colt Emerson, David Ortiz, Ethan Holliday (Jackson’s younger brother, currently in high school and eligible for the 2025 MLB Draft), Frank Fleming (a.k.a. Frank the Tank), George Brett, Ichiro, Jackson Chourio, Jung Hoo Lee, 4th overall pick of the 2024 MLB Draft Nick Kurtz, Roman Anthony, Ronald Acuña Jr., Sandy Koufax, and 1st overall pick of the 2024 MLB Draft Travis Bazzana. Six autos per box and as usual, Leaf is not selling these boxes directly to the public. Major online retailers have jumped the prices up to about $175, but if you hunt around, you can still find them for around $160.