SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello and welcome to Talking Cards with Grand Salami and the Juice. I am your host, The Juice, along here with Grand Slami Bert. And then we hey Bert, how you doing? I'm doing good.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

I'm happy to be talking to Slab Squatch, man.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Yes, we have Slab Squash here today, aka Corey. And you know him from all of his excellent write-ups on odds and what can be expected. Very in-depth, lengthy, and as far as I can tell, very accurate. I trust the numbers. He's been doing this for a while, and it seems like um he's always hitting things right on the nose, gets that data out very quickly to us. So, yes, so welcome, Corey. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Awesome. How's it going? Good, good to be here. I feel like you've rolled out the red carpet. I feel super welcome. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Good. Yeah, we are very happy to have you. So before we actually get into this, um, let me just let you introduce yourself, give us your Twitter X handle. Uh, you also have a sub stack. So why don't you give us all that info so everyone can know where to find additional info? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

Uh Corey Merriman. I go by the the persona of Slab Squatch on on you know in the card universe. On my home base is X, formerly Twitter. It's just Slab Squatch Sports Cards on there at Waxmetrics with an X, M-E-T-R-I-X, is the the professional part of that. Um, but I like to I like to keep it whimsical with the Slab Squatch, you know. Did start a Substack here recently, a few months ago. Someone recommended, hey, you should have a Substack. Like, what in the heck is that? I have no idea. So apparently it's it's where people put articles they write. And you know, um it's it's a nice little it's a nice little archive. You can kind of put them all together and easily searchable, easily navigable. So I I do have that. That's uh just Slab Squash sports cards on on on uh Substack. There's a paid tier and there's a free tier. You can see everything on there for free for the first week that it's on there, right? After that, it goes behind the paywall, it's only seven bucks a month. So I gotta promote it a little bit, but you know, that's that's where they're all located.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Well worth the price. I will say, as a paid subscriber, I like to talk about this a lot, but for Bowman, I there's like a holy trinity of Substackslash services that I pay for. One of them is your service, Slab Squatch with the pack odds, because that gives me a piece of things. The second leg of that is Big Bob's Prospect Analytics site, and the third leg of that is Prospect Pulse by Dahl. Because all three of those things come together, and I'll oftentimes have three tabs open and be looking across all three of them when I'm buying, when I'm pricing breaks, when I'm doing research for a product. So yeah, definitely recommend that everybody check out Slap Squatch's Substack. It is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

I've previously referred to those three as the holy trinity of card substacks because that's what you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

I use both those guys' stuff as well. It's uh very, very well done. They get they go deep, and that's what I appreciate.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Yeah. Yeah, and and when you're spending all this money on cards and stuff, you need every edge you can get. You know, I know that people, some people agree with cards being compared to gambling, but some people don't agree. Either way, no matter what, when you walk into a casino, you want to know your odds, you want to know what you're getting into, you want to know where you're putting your money. And this is the best resource for that. He he has so much information so that you know that when you put your money in, what sort of expectation you can have reasonably about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

I hope that what Slab Squatch is doing too, like gets more collectors involved with reading and analyzing the pack odds. Because for a while there, I was worried that Topps was just gonna do away with them altogether, kind of like Panini. And it seems like they've actually not gone away from them, but actually started posting them a little bit more proactively before releases.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

So hopefully that trend continues. I have noticed that they've leaned a little harder into it, um, posting them earlier. A lot of people think I'm, you know, a little bit, I don't know, placing a lot, a lot of faith in in their odds, which may not be warranted. And usually what I say to that is if they're wrong, I mean, they're wrong sometimes. Sure, they're they're fat fingered, they're they've transposed stuff, there's stuff that's wrong, but there's way too much many data points there for them to just intentionally be inaccurate. They're doing their best, they're actually trying to get those things right. We can usually tell when they're wrong, you know, as deep as we die, we can usually tell when things are wrong and change it accordingly. But I think they're doing their best. And I appreciate that they do that because no one else does really to that to that extent, you know.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Yeah, they don't have to, but they do do it. It is a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Well, the big reason why we're here is because tomorrow, and you're probably listening to this out of itself release day, but it is time for 2026. Bowman Baseball is finally here. This episode, we are going to talk more about the product as a whole, like we do with our usual product breakdown episodes. If you want to hear a prospect by prospect analysis, our six previous episodes went division by division. We had Max Artiburner Prospects Live and we had Big Bob of Big Bob's cards to really get into those prospects for us. So, this is going to be more surface level than that. If you want to hear about what we think about every first woman prospect in this product, though, make sure to check those previous ones out. So the release date Wednesday, May 13th at 12 Eastern time. It shouldn't be the most difficult product to get, I don't think, on the TOPS website, but you still will have your work cut out for you, I think. So just be ready, try to get make sure you're logged in, make sure you have your payment info all typed out, be ready for the new capture of putting things in squares. And yeah, just be prepared. All right.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

I'm afraid it might be a little bit tougher this year than it has in the past, you know, with just kind of the general way the market's going. And then they have this little, uh, this little trend they've been doing lately where they make very little available for pre-orders. In the meantime, the third-party vendors market way up. So then when it goes on that that day of that that drop day, it looks like the best deal on earth. And everybody wants it, you know. So hopefully there'll be enough of it. I mean, this it's not a short printed product, there's plenty of it. Hopefully, there'll be enough to satisfy demand.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

And we are the price for hobby boxes, $259.99, $260.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Just looking at DealerNet right now, obviously this is Bowman Eve the day before release, but these boxes are only selling for about $300 to $325 a box. Um so maybe there is hope there for the common collector. Uh, usually the bots will only attack something super hard if they see a comp on DealerNet that's way harder and they could hit their margin targets. But with this one, especially given the lag time of making the order and waiting for tops to actually deliver it, and also just hide how dynamic and ever changing and quickly changing the Bowman market can be in the first couple of weeks. Wouldn't surprise me if the bots pass on this one and give the collectors a chance to get a box or two. So hopefully fingers crossed. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Yeah. So we are looking at a few different SKUs. Um, I'll give you what you can expect from them, and Corey's gonna give us the breakdown of what you can really expect from them. Hobby boxes, like we said, $259.99. Those are coming in at 20 packs per box, uh, one auto per box in hobby. We also have jumbo with three autos, and then we have breakers of light down to two autos now. 10 cards per pack, one pack per box, excuse me. On the retail side of things, we have megas and blaster boxes available. Megas, I know there's been some curiosity if we're gonna start seeing the first Bowman label on the Mega Mojos. So that I think is remained remaining to be seen. But I'm gonna let you take it from here to Corey about the different SKUs and you know what we can what sort of expectations we should have on these.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

Well, let me get right into exactly what you were just talking about because there is a big question mark with megas. A month ago, there would have been no question marks at all. There was no indicator, no reason to think they'll be any different than any megas that that they've had the last few years. However, since then we've seen uh a couple of different megas. So we've had the the basketball fleet. I think there was another one too, where they started interspersing the mojo parallels in with the regular packs. So they're not just strictly the mojo packs, two packs of five. There's no indicator that they're doing that with baseball. So let me just be clear on that. But they did do that with basketball, and the odds on basketball stated that there would be one mojo pride, and there's six packs in a box. So I fully expect there'd be six mojos per box, which the way Topps works, that makes sense. They went from 10 last year in baseball. It seems like they would go to six and uh charge the same price. It just makes it, I don't like it, but it makes sense on what you would expect them to do. But the basketball product proved us wrong, and the odds were wrong, right? So there's actually two mojo parallels in every pack. So there's 12 per box. One of those is an insert mojo insert. So there's actually 11 mojo parallels plus one mojo insert in every box. So that leads to some questions on the baseball side. Are they gonna do that with baseball? I don't know. I hope. I mean, that would make the megas a much better product. Over the last few couple years, they just haven't really been the conversation as being a good format to a good value format to rip. But if there were twice as many mojos in the box, okay, that's that that makes a lot better product just right off the bat. We all we know for sure, assuming the odds are right, which I don't see any reason why this would be wrong because it was also the case in basketball. There are no case hits in baseball megas. Um so you can't get any of the animes or anything like that. So it kind of immediately kind of drops them a little bit. But one thing we also saw in basketball was the the they introduced first Bowman autos as the Mojo autos in basketball. As you know, we haven't seen that in a long time in baseball. I don't know if we've ever had first Bowman autos in mega boxes in baseball. If we have, it's been some years. I know there was the HTA choice parallels, which looked the same and had the first bones, whatever. There's kind of some cloudiness there. But in the mega boxes, it's it's traditionally been a completely different image and not a first Bowman, even if the guy just had his first Bowman. I've always thought it would be an easy, easy way for tops to make value a lot greater on the mega boxes if they would just have first Bowman. If some of those megas were first Bowman, super easy. Like it's it'd be cheaper for them. They don't have to print a completely different card, right? Make the same card they got.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

On the image variations, too. Like not even the autos. If you put them on the image variations, that would lift the product a lot as well.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

It just makes sense. And from a collector standpoint, it would just add so much value to that product. And now you're talking a mega box is is really a desirable, a desirable format, right? So there are some questions there. Again, I don't have any reason to believe that they're making changes, except for the fact that they did these things in basketball. So I'm kind of hoping that we see some of those in baseball. I may be completely off base and totally wrong. I don't know. So I guess we'll find out in a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

So that's the mega box situation.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Yeah. And luckily we have all the odds for the other formats too, right? And it looks like I I think I read in one of your write-ups that Topps has given Bowman the Ozempic treatment yet again.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Yeah. So did you all right? So in my write-ups, usually the first thing I go into is kind of total production. I compare it to prior years or you know, other products or whatever's relevant to that product at that time. There's 15% less cards printed in 26 Bowman versus 25 Bowman. Now you wouldn't think that would be the case. That's usually not the case. Usually they're that's going the opposite way. But the Ozipic treatment, they trimmed the the how many box how many cards are in the box by a couple different ways, you know. Value boxes have 12 less cards in the box because they they've got what is it, two less per pack or whatever. So six packs of 10, it used to be six packs of 12, I think last year.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 11:55

So they trimmed everything its own different way in a little bit, but all those things cumulatively at the end of the day made for like 20 million fewer cards in the product, even though the production levels of the formats stayed relatively similar. Some are up a little bit, some are down a little bit, but there wasn't any great changes across the board in that. So I was happy to see, I guess, that there's less less production. I mean, that's I think that's solid, but there's still just as many boxes out there, so it's not gonna be harder to get, you know, as a result.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Is it mostly just the base paper that they're cutting out? Because I I think the number of parallels is fairly similar compared to last year, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:32

Yeah, the parallels were very similar. In fact, I can bring this up right here. So total base for 26 Bowman is a little over 106 million cards. And I've got this in my write-up, but I there's a lot of figures I don't just remember right off the bat.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

If you could remember last year, that would be um I don't even know. That would just be a crazy photographic memory with all the numbers that come across your desk.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Total base last year. Huh, okay. Well, I've got it split up in 33 million cards. So 133 down to 106. So yeah, that that production. Yeah. That production that went down mostly due to just the base.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Wow. So that's gonna feel a little bit more colorful and and chromey and refractory than your typical case break would, at least of hobby and blaster, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Yeah, yeah, you would think. Um I did a comparison of the value boxes from last year to this year, and I don't know if you caught that or not, but um, that was an interesting little kind of dive. So they they've set back in the autos pretty significantly. There's quite a few less autos in 26 than there were in 2015. So what that equates to in the value box side is about 2.7 less autos per case than we saw in 2025. And I know Bert, you're a big fan of 2025. I know you ripped a lot of that and you really like the product. So just expect less autos, especially in the value boxes. Not, I'm not saying in the in the hobbies or anything.

SPEAKER_03 13:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

But they kind of replace that though, because now uh, you know, last year it was just uh the only case hit available in the value boxes was the animes, and they're extremely tough to hit. Well, now you can hit all those case hits in in the value boxes.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Yeah, that's a big deal. The hit rate is like over one per case of the rare SSPs in the blaster cases, right? Which is insane.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

Yeah, I have it at one in like 30 and a half boxes.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

That's step feeling a little more panini-like. I think they might be trying to take a little bit of a lesson from that. Retail's always been really popular in the Panini stuff, and a lot of that's driven by the the case hits.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Yeah, you know, some of those are really nice. Like I I've never hit a crystallize. I really want to. That's one of my favorite, like just the way the cards appear. I haven't hit one yet, but I'd like to catch one of those. Um I have had an anime. I hit an anime last year of Dylan Cruz. Uh, threw that on eBay and sold it to George Cruz, which happens to be his dad. So that was no way. I love when that happened. So those were tough last year. This year, the case that so essentially this year you're trading 2.7 autos for likely you're gonna hit one case hit and possibly two. You know, if it's one in 30 point whatever boxes, then that tells you that in 25% of cases, you'll just you'll have two.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

So what's the split of uh the paper retail autos versus chrome autos in the in in blasters? Is it one to one kind of like one one paper for every chrome or something like that? We've got a lot of numbers here.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Um, it's 55%. 55% paper autos in the in the value boxes. Okay, so it's pretty close, yeah. Autos should fall one in ten boxes, which I ripped a case yesterday and it wasn't one in ten. Um, I only got three autos in my case. Assuming there's four, that just that's variance. If you expect four autos in a case, there'll be three in some, there'll be five or six in others. Um, but out of a four-auto case, I suspect generally there'll be a two of them, at least two of them that'll be paper. So that's a little bit less than desirable, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Your three, were they two paper, one chrome?

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Or I had two chrome and one paper. It was two base chrome and one purple paper. You hit any good names? Seaver King was the paper. I think he was the best. He's solid. Um the other guys I didn't recognize.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Okay, right on. I guess the other big change, too, looking at the hobby configurations is year over year at least, is delight going to two autos. That's that's a pretty substantive change. And they didn't talk much about that. I was even caught off guard when I started pricing outbreaks. Like, wait, what? Six box cases, only 12 autos, not 18? That's a that's a big difference, but it sounds like that is big. They'll at least be more colorful than previous years.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

So yeah, it looked like they're replacing that with uh at least a numbered parallel, which I mean, okay, it's delight. You would expect that, right? They're not gonna put base in there. There are base inserts in there, which is a bit frustrating if you're ripping a delight box. I hope that doesn't affect you much with there's the fact that they're being less. I'm sure they didn't lower the price on them from last year, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Like, no, I mean they're pretty spendy on the secondary market, that's for sure. But there's a lot of factors that play into that too. We'll see how it goes post-release. I don't know. I think uh I think a lot of collectors are gonna be caught off guard that it's only two autos per box with how they've been doing delight for the past few years now.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Do you prefer to do those as case breaks on the delight side, or do you kind of use those to throw into more, you know, mixed mixed breaks or whatever with other formats?

SPEAKER_01 17:00

Oh man, I'd like to do them mixed when I can. If it's like a multi-like we're doing a 10-caser tomorrow with BK brakes and we're doing six delight, but we're also throwing in two jumbo and two hobby because it just it spreads it out that way. You know, some some configurations are gonna have more of some cards than others, and that's always gonna be the case. So it's especially on like wave one release day where the top's collation can sometimes be pretty bad. You want to kind of try to diversify where you can in a break. Right.

unknown 17:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

I'm sure on the sorting side, breakers delight is just delightful.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Well, yeah. And that's honestly one of the big factors I think that drives the secondary price on that too. Yeah. That's just the that's just the facts.

SPEAKER_02 17:39

It's gotta be a good good time to sit there and rip delight boxes. I've never actually opened one myself, and I mean, I've seen how stacked some of these things can be, you know. So I I kind of envy you for that. Get to open those things.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

That's fun, man.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

I remember the very well, I think this was the first time I did delight. It was Top's update chrome. I don't remember what year, but they made them available on the Top's website, and I was able to get a couple boxes. So that's the only time I ever ripped Delight on my own. Did not do well. Um, I don't even remember what was in them. That 24 update, probably. That sounds right.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

Yeah. Um, yeah, I didn't know you gotta watch too because they'll change those delight skews on you. You know, in some in particular um years, they've had literal base cards in there. Yeah, it might have been Bowman last year. There was like two, two um just base chromes in there, which I think on the 1012 barbers. I I didn't see base on the on the odds for those. There might be, I'm I might be mistaken. I definitely did see base inserts on there, just straight up base inserts, but I didn't notice any base chrome being in there. Um, I hope not, anyway. You know, you spend that kind of money on a few cards, you don't want to see base.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

All right, well, it is kind of awful. You know what?

SPEAKER_02 18:47

I'm looking again, and you're right. There, there is base chrome prospects.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

I think a typical delight box is supposed to be like two or three base chrome. Sometimes they give you a bonus parallel. So that's sometimes it's that that's your third card. You have a base insert on the back of the pack that gets you to four cards, and then you have the four numbered hits and the two autos now. So and three of them is it three numbered geometrics per box? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

I've got the number to being four in the in the breakers of the lie, but that's probably because they took away an auto and and they're adding a numbered parallel.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

Well, let's get into the uh checklist and the actual breakdowns we have on these. We will start with the base set is 100 cards. That's the set where you're gonna find your vets and your rookies. They do have red rookie redemptions back as well. The big rookie that we are seeing making his Bowman debut is I'm gonna take a Murakami. I've spoken about before how much I love him. You have a lot of the other big rookies. You have Roman Anthony, Mizarowski, at Keggs, McLean, Schlitler, Al Stewart's here. Um, but then a few of the guys that have made their debut this year that we haven't seen in Toss product yet. We're not gonna see yet. We're not seeing a Kevin McGonagall rookie, AJ rookie, we're not seeing a Conor Griffin rookie.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

I will say it's nice this year compared to last year that the two odds-on favorites for rookie of the year do have rep rookies in Bowman. Last year it was just Jacob Wilson at the time, who everybody thought was gonna win until his teammate come came along and caught him. But on the NL side, all the front runners were not rookie. They didn't have rookies in Bowman. So at least this year Murakami is the the front runner and McLean's the front runner in the NL, and they both have red rookies. But a lot of season left.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

And Sal Stewart, he he's he's on there. I know he's one of the front runners in the NL. In fact, I pulled I pulled seven red rookies in the case that I opened. Oh, interesting. I pulled uh uh Muracami, Moonshots, I call him. Um pulled him, pulled a Sal Stewart, and pulled a Chase the Lauder out of the seven.

SPEAKER_03 20:44

Right.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

So that seemed like a pretty uh I think there's a pretty good chance at least one of those hitting if if not two, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

I mean, that's pretty nice. If you can get a blaster case for MSRP at what, twelve hundred bucks, and then if you hit if you happen to hit one or two red rookies, ends up being like a thousand dollar case. It's not a terrible rip at all.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

And you know what's funny is um I saw what the um what the miracamos were going for, and it's far more than a hundred right now. So I put it, I put it on eBay and it's all within five minutes for close to 200, actually, which is like yeah, double what you're gonna get if if he wins a rookie of the year. So I can't imagine it's gonna stay that level, but it is now.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

He just doesn't have enough US stuff yet. He's only in top scroll.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

So I wonder where they settle, because like last year Jacob Wilson was even more of an odds-on favorite to win rookie of the year than Murkami is this year. And his were selling for like 70. They kind of settled at 70. Yeah. I wonder with Murray Kami, though, with his international market, like Ju said, I wonder if they stay above a hundred.

SPEAKER_02 21:40

I don't I you know, I'd be kind of shocked because I mean there's like sixteen thousand of those. It's not, it's not like it's super court printed or anything, you know. And then as he can as they have more cards, a top scrum will come out and all this stuff. Like, I just can't imagine it camping over a hundred, you know. It's that's what I expected, is it to be the seventy, seventy five dollar range? That's why I sold it.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

What a yeah, nice sale. Man, those rookies and everything are always nice, but the big reason why you're here Rip and Bowman is Score Prospects. So this prospect set list is 150 cards. Again, if you want to hear the different guys and our thoughts about them, you know, Ethan, Holiday, Florentino, of course, that is who Big Bob said is going to be the guy. But if you want to hear it on all the guys, all the sleepers, listen to those previous six episodes. I really don't want to say that.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

We will say one thing, Bruce. I know we have a lot of people who listen to the podcast who are just getting into the hobby and are probably still trying to wrap their head around Bowman and how it works. I know it can be daunting. But with Bowman flagship releasing tomorrow, be aware that if you're after a rookie or a veteran, they will not have chrome parallels. There's no refractor parallels of the rookies or veterans. You have to wait until Bowman Chrome for those guys to get their first non-auto refractors. You can get paper parallels of the rookies and veterans in the base checklist, but you can't get chrome refractors. And so that's that definitely plays a big piece. For example, if you're looking at PYP break pricing on some of these rookies and vets, be aware of that.

SPEAKER_02 23:05

And rookies and vets will have chrome autos and they're extremely tough. They're a really, really tough pool.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

What is it, like one in three cases or something like that for any kind of rookie auto, typically? I guess.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

I'm showing one in 1,439 packs. So that's gonna be 20 times eight, 160. Gosh, that's like nine cases.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

That's for the base auto though. So if you look at it, so overall, it's usually about half.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Yeah, if you factor the others in, it's gonna be better than that. Yeah, probably twice as easy.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

What's the print run on an average base rookie auto?

SPEAKER_02 23:42

For the base is around 500. Um, I know there's a refractor number to 499. Um, but if you if you dip into the odds, they they show about 500 on on just the base unnumbered auto.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

That's where it gets kind of interesting sometimes because a guy's will have different numbers of base autos, of course, that they sign. Some will be volume signers and some will be you know a fraction of them. And sometimes the base autos can be even more rare than the numbered ones. So that's something that we keep an eye out when the when the product actually starts getting opened and hitting eBay. If you have a base hook yellow, you might actually have something nicer than you than you might think. It'd be more as you think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

That's also something that the odds will never tell us, you know. So when I figure all this stuff out, it's it's literally an average, right? It's like I take all the all the base autos, I divide it by the number in the checklist, and it's just on average they're signing this many. And maybe on the on the you know, the Bowman, it's not as prevalent, but in the stuff where that has the big superstars, you know, Otani's not signing the same number of base autos as as some, you know, some schlub. That's a you know, so he may be extremely short printed, and you just can't tell by the odd by the by the odds. You just have to look at the market, you know, see what's available.

SPEAKER_03 24:50

Did you know variables?

SPEAKER_02 24:52

Last year there was some basketball product, I can't remember exactly what it was, but they released odds, and when they did, they released the wrong thing, the wrong sheet. There's like some Excel sheet, and it showed the actual number of the base autos. And like LeBron had like 30, and other guys had like 1200. That's like unnumbered base autos. Jus, you remember that?

SPEAKER_01 25:14

You're the one that told me about that in the first place, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Yeah, we talked about that on one of the episodes, and I was able to find the sheet. Um that's awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

So we know that's a thing. There's 100% that is a thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Right. Now, if only it was the sheet would actually tell us how many they're holding back for like damaged claim hits and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

So someone will screw up in the conversation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to get into there. So I'd be happy to talk to you guys about that too. That's that's that's that's one of the jams right there.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

For sure. So for the inserts in this product, we're really only gonna get into the super short prints, uh, the cases, as some people call them. And as you all know, I love my SSPs. So before we get into them on an individual basis and the breakdown for each, Corey, what can we expect? Like in a jumbo case, you know, is it truly a case hit to hit one of these SSPs? Is it one every couple? Like, what are we looking at here?

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Can you give me a second on that one?

SPEAKER_00 26:10

No, we need a right.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

I didn't figure that. I did figure that on on value boxes, but I'd not figure that on jumbos or hobbies. That's a really good question, actually.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

Yeah, like um, if you have that on like jumbo and hobby and breakers, that that's really gonna be interesting, especially because I'm gonna have this info when Bert releases his next pick your parallel break before anyone else has it.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

No, definitely. And I can tell you too, I crunched the numbers on the on the delight cases because I was worried after what happened with Bowman Chrome last year, where the delight boxes were shorted heavily on garbage pail kids. I know. Obviously, one of the big chases. That was the first time that they they did that where the delights had so few compared to the other two hobby configurations. It looks like they kind of did the same thing here. Like the the SSPs are gonna be pretty hard to hit in Delight. And I I think, and Slasquatch can tell us in just a second, probably when he when he puts the numbers through his sheet, but I think it's only gonna be like one in four-ish cases for delight, but I they'll be they'll come out more often in the hobby and the jumbo.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Was that denoted that that instance you're talking about? Was that denoted in the odds that it show they were extremely harder to hit on the GPKs?

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Yeah, it did. We thought they were wrong.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

Not only that, I remember last year after release, they after you put out your pricing for all your briefs, they announced the garbage pail kids autographs. I remember that too.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Yeah, because our what was it, 20 delight case or 30 delight cases, and that that was the big that was the break. We didn't have any hobby or jumbo, and so yeah, that was that was not a cool thing.

SPEAKER_02 27:46

All right, so I just figured the jumbo, and so this is factoring in the patchwork, anime, esting glass, spotlights, crystallized, final draft? Oh, yeah, final draft.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

Yeah, that's yeah, I'm not considering pack fracture a uh an SSP. I'm just considering that another parallel.

SPEAKER_02 28:02

Showing 61% of cases are gonna have one of those rare inserts. That's jumbo cases. Okay. 61%. So not one per case. That's a tough hit, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

I bet so you're actually more likely to hit one of those in a blaster case than you are in a jumbo case. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

That was one of the that's one of the big reasons why I suggested blasters, right? Yeah. And I've got some to get into on the blasters. Like a lot of people saw, you know, I opened the case last night, and a lot of people there had a lot of comments about oh, it's underwhelming. And I even commented that it was not it was not a good case. It was definitely behind the curve, right? But it was nice because it gave us an idea of what the numbers actually mean. The numbers were almost spot on. I mean, I I I a month ago I put in my write-up, I expect 70 um parallels in a blaster case. And what did I hit? 70 parallels.

SPEAKER_01 28:52

I mean, it was 40 reptilians, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

Yeah, and it's just you gotta see them in hand, like to know that's well, it's all 299s and 399s. There was there was 13 chrome parallels and 17 paper parallels, the rest are reptilians, you know. So it was nice to visualize that. I think it might have shocked some people because I heard a number of people say after reading my my stuff, like blasters are juiced, they're gonna be so hot. Yeah, I mean, not really, right? But you have to look at it comparatively, the dollar per spent and compare it to other formats. So I wouldn't call them juice by any means.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

Higher floor, lower ceiling, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:29

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, so 58% of hobby cases should have a case hit or uh, you know, a rare insert.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Okay, that that's interesting too, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

Yeah, so that's that's a huge juxtaposition. 80%, what was it like 61% on the jumbos, and then I've got one in 30 boxes on value boxes. So, like some will have two. That's that's wild. If you think about it that way, that's wild.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Yeah, that yeah. If you're SSP hunting, that that's gotta be your way to go. Like it's yeah, I mean, SSP hunting is it's just hard to do in general because you know, one you hit one of these many in 30 boxes of that, and then you also has to be the player, you know. You don't want say Don Rafael.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Yeah, I took a little flag because I think I dogged him a little bit whenever I pulled that.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

I don't know if you saw it, but it was uh it was it was a little bit frustrating. I I pulled up, I saw you post the video and I was at work, so I pulled it up and I just wanted to see what the case hit was. So I just uh fast forwarded to that and just watched it without saying and I was like, uh, okay. It's a cool looking card though. It is that it's cool.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

I have some mixed emotions on the actual card. It does look cool, it has that refractor, it looks, it's a it's a quality-looking card, right? I'm a little bit lost on the meaning, you know. Like what what what is it signifying? It's a picture of a jersey with patches on it. It doesn't say patchwork on the front. You have no idea what it is if you don't know what you're looking at. It doesn't say the player's name on the front, it's just a player and a jersey and patches. I didn't, you know, I don't know. I don't know what they're trying to get at here, you know. And I've said more than once, I think it's a good opportunity that they miss. I think they could easily throw a nasty little patch, actual patch in there.

SPEAKER_03 31:08

Yeah, that'd be good.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

I know in in Bowman Chrome, patches haven't really done well in the past. Um they've done them patch autos and stuff, but that might be a good one if it's a you know, rare case hit type thing with a dirty, nasty patch with a little the little sticker on it that has the the you know, the the MLB sticker or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

I'm in the camp of keep patches away from my Bowman Chrome and my Tox Chrome, unless we're talking logo man or uh debut patch, but yeah, that yeah, that's always gonna be a different thing.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

The quality should be there for sure, not just some old scrubby napkin patch.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

I like I like for these Zakart to stand on its own. I feel like the patch takes away from it than like this kind of product. All right, so patchwork is the first case hit insert that I want to talk about. It is a brand new insert for this, brand new SSP. It is 30 cards, 30 players. It comes in just base, red, and super. And it's a mix of vets and prospects, but these are gonna be more names that you know because these are no first Bowman guys. None of these guys are brand new to Bowman. These are guys that have been obviously with the vets around and even the prospects. Uh, prospects, you have like JJ Weatherholt, George Lombar Jr., Mate. Um, and then you have a lot of nice vets too. So you have Jose Ramirez, Jack Keggs, rookie, Bryce Harper, Ichiro, Vladdy Jr., Lindor, Conna Griffin. I don't think he's gonna be listed as a rookie card. Uh Bert, how do you feel about the uh patchwork cards in this?

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Well, I I like the design. I think I think collectors are gonna like them. I think they're gonna start out really strong in the singles market. I do think Topps was intentional in leaving off some of the bigger names that they could have put on here because they'll probably want to include them in future Bowman releases. So I bet it'll be a returner. What's the PR on these, Squatch?

SPEAKER_02 32:57

They're 180, I think. 185, 190.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

And they gave it the treatment where they don't even have black refractors, it's just base and then red and then super, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:05

One and the base.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Yeah. I just I just look at these 30 names and I think, man, wouldn't it suck to hit Saddam Rafaela of all these? How does that feel? That's funny. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

Did you watch that part of that video? I did, yeah. I was, yeah, I was a little bit. I don't know. I thought I held it well, but I was a little flabbergasted, you know. And I saw it as a Red Sox player. It didn't have a name on the front. I'm like, man, that really doesn't look like Roman Anthony. Like, who else who could that be? I don't know who that is. It's one of supposed to be one of the best 30 players in baseball. Yeah, that was a little bit disappointing. At least we got a you know, a rare insert. You know, that sold today too. I I listed that, and and the person that bought it mentioned the video and said, Yeah, I saw you kind of dogged it a little bit. I'm like, well, I'll give it to you a little cheaper now, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Yeah, because you said 20, 30 bucks, right? So how much did you end up getting for it?

SPEAKER_02 33:54

65. I listed it for 100 and sold it for 65. All right. I mean, for a Sadon Raphaela card, I'm not I'm not disappointed, you know. And it went to a good home. So good, good for them. Yeah, cool. Um, were you able to get that number? I did. This is gonna surprise you. Um, case hits, rare inserts, as it were, in Breakers of the Light. 23.6% of cases are gonna have one. So, like one in four cases, essentially. Okay, it probably doesn't surprise you because you noticed that before Breakers of the Light, but yeah, that's that's that's a trend.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

So Jumbo you said was like 61 hobby, like 57, 58 hobby. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

So blaster like on a per dollar basis is by far the best way to chase SSPs.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

And when you also factor in, that's based on pre-order pricing. So blasters aren't, I mean, they're not gonna just spike in price, they're gonna be available for a while, right? At 30 bucks. Eventually they'll probably go up when they when they start to filter out. But you know, jumbo, hobby, these things, these are they're already spiking in price. They're gonna be probably 50, 80, 75 higher, you know, before too long. So when you factor in that those price changes, I mean, value boxes are just, as you said, by far the best way to go for those inserts.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

That's a big paradigm shift.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

So that's that's one thing that's kind of fascinating to me about Bowman, right? Each format kind of does its, it has its own length. None of them are just there's no trash formats. Like in flagship releases, okay, megas are kind of trash, maybe. Unless they have these new changes, then they won't be. But in flagship formats, there's a lot of just there's a lot of trash formats in a flagship release. You know, the the retail and the blasters are usually trash in in like a top series one or whatever. But this is like blasters do some things right that the other ones don't do. Uh Hobby does its own things right. Uh, the post I I went into today, Hobby is by far the best for if you're just wanting a quality hit, uh, kind of made this little metric that kind of helps me decide what you not just autos, not just parallels, but you know, lower numbered stuff, rarer stuff. And those are concentrated the best in hobby, even better than jumbo. They're gonna have each one of those is gonna have one quality hit per box. Oh, and hobby's way cheaper than jumbo. So it's it's a better buy in that regard. Now, Jumbo it's lane as autos. I mean, if you want autos, jumbo's the way to go. 100% the way to go. Even with the higher price, it's cheaper to get autos, it's cheaper to get numbered autos. Lower price. I guess you can factor in breaker's delight in there because as we discussed, they've got the highest percentage of numbered autos in there, but they're just not readily available. It's hard to really factor those into the equation much.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

And so many of those delight autos, to be fair, are are going to be the green lavas and the HTA choice, which are not the most desirable parallels. You know, typically those go for even less than an out of 499 would, even though they're out of 99 and out of 150. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:40

So each thing kind of has its own lane, and hopefully they make the right changes to the megas to where then it'll have its its own lane too. And if they do that, then you've got, I mean, you buy any of these, any of these different formats, and you know, like it's there's not really a bad buy in the bunch, right? So that's that's what I like about Bowman.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

It's a solid release, it's a solid rip uh product to rip all different price levels. Let's go ahead and we can move on to our next insert, our next SSP insert that is anime. These come in black, red, and superfractor. This is 29 cards, mix of vets, prospects, and new prospects. One thing before we go into this that I do want to note is that we talked about this before. Some of the players are not with the regular teams, they're they're more world baseball classic teams. Aaron Judge, Witter with USA, Skeens with USA, Otani with Japan. So just something to note if you're getting into team breaks and stuff like that. Just something to be aware of because they might handle that weird or differently. And then also, we do have seven of the cards that have kanji variations. So also those are cool and very ultra rare. Yeah, some of the standout names, soda, trout, games, judge, wit. Murakami has an anime that's gonna be exciting. Huge otani, of course, as always. And then not really any stinkers here. I the one that stands out to me. Bird, are we gonna do this? One, one of these things is not like the other. Yes. All right, let me know when you got it.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Oh, are you gonna count us down here?

SPEAKER_00 38:12

You want to announce this? We we do it where um yeah, on the anime's one of these players stands out as not being on the level or the tier levels of the other players. And usually we come with the same guy. Do you have the checklist up or no?

SPEAKER_01 38:24

I think I'm gonna go different than you here, but let's go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

I don't have a checklist open. Maybe I need to open that. It's all right. We'll just do this quick. I don't want to spend too much time on it. All right, you're good. One, two, three. Joey Votto.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

I'll see you in my custom tonight. He's been terrible. I mean, it's still a rookie and he's got the international market behind him. And no, I think you're right. Joey Votto actually has a pretty dedicated and loyal group of collectors.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

He does. He does. It's just Captain Cam. It's just such a random name to throw in there. Non-rookie, vet, just when you're just looking at these names, it just stood out to me.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Well, a question for Squatch on anime too, and I I want to get into the kanji in particular because sometimes the pack odds can be very revealing when it comes to a very small number of subjects in a subset, and then the super rare, because it you almost get down to a level where it tells you where like the super fracture kanji is going to be, or how many of the seven superfractor kanjis are going to be in which boxes. So I was I was curious to get like kind of your take on if you're at the end of the day. That's definitely super rare.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

It's definitely a thing. Sometimes they'll mask it a little bit, they'll they'll put that that number on multiple columns. So even though there's you know only five superfractors, you might find the odds say there's 10 because I think they're trying to mask exactly what formats you're gonna, especially if there's like one or two of them. You know, that I don't think they want to make it perfectly clear. Oh, this superfactor is in this format. Sometimes they do, but sometimes I've seen they'll mask them a little bit lately. Um, as far as the animes in particular, so there's 29 total in the checklist, right? Is that right? Mm-hmm. Okay. That's an odd number.

unknown 40:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 40:02

Um, I've got 11 of them being in hobby format and eight of them being in jumbo, five in breakers, and the rest are in v value boxes.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Okay, interesting. Yeah, kind of back to what you were saying around like if you want to go after the big super low numbered, the biggest chases in the product, you know, your product, your product hits. You usually want to go with the hobby or the jumbo or the delight, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Now imagine hitting one of those supers out of a value box.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

Seriously. I saw somebody pulled the Jacob Mizurawski crystallized super already. I'm not sure who it was.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

No kidding. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

I'm not sure what it came out of, but I saw a picture pop up of it.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

I want to see that picture. I'm sure that's a beautiful card. It is. Well, our next SSP on here is Final Draft. And this one is just 20 cards. It has a black, a red, and a super. It is once again a mix of vets and prospects. But again, these are mostly the newer prospects. Uh, you also have some legends here, Jeter, Griffey. You do have Ethan Holliday here. I think he's the only new prospect on here. Mm-hmm. Konnor Griffin, Harper, Roman Anthony, Otani has a card. So, yeah, this is actually a really, really solid checklist for final draft. Honestly, the the worst one here right now, he hasn't gotten a hit in like, I don't know how many days, but Big Dumper is probably the worst one here right now.

SPEAKER_02 41:19

Oh man, what do you guys know about those final drafts? Um, I saw a picture of one maybe yesterday, and they did not look familiar. I don't know, I don't remember them being in the product before.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

They definitely had them before, but they could be um different, different artwork, like with ascensions, how they used to be different every time. Okay. It could be like kind of like that style. I'm pretty sure they look final draft concept.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

They originated in like 2024, 2023 Bowman draft, and then they've only been in Bowman draft. This is the first time it's in Bowman flagship. It's especially interesting to see Shohei Otani have one of these. You wonder if Shohei is actually gonna lift up the value of these parallels. He very well could, because final draft has never sold very well at all, even for the big first Bowman guys. You know, it's always when you're opening up draft and you hit a final draft, it's like hitting an ascensions in Bowman chrome. It's like shit. I wish that would have been a GPK, or I wish that would have been a crystallized or a spotlight.

SPEAKER_02 42:14

So I found something fascinating on the final drafts on the superfractors. There are five in hobby, there are five in jumbo, there are five in breakers of light, and there are five in blasters.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Split right down the middle. Huh. Those will be big cards. Oh, the insert that I want to go over next never gets enough love. We talk about it all the time. S Crystallized 20 card checklist, and this is another one where you can find a lot of the newer prospects here. Yeah, Arquette, Arracusin of the twins, and then obviously you have your mix of vets as well. You got Judge. Oh, Florentino does have a card in Crystallized. That's gonna be very nice, Chase. Ethan Holiday's here. You got Skeens, Otani again. Lindor is a card that I really would love to have. Um, yeah, this this looks like a great checklist. Uh gold, orange, red, and super. So the most parallels on any of these SPs.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

That's that's what I was gonna point out is out of all these SSPs, Crystallized is the only one that has gold and orange. It looks so nice. It looks so nice on these cards.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

Have you seen one in person? Have you had any hand? You've you've probably pulled them, right?

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Yeah, I have. I've never pulled a red or a super, but I've pulled all the other colors.

SPEAKER_02 43:28

I assume they're like uh shiny, you know, mini diamond, something, like they have some sort of sheen. The the pictures don't look, they don't they don't look that good. The pictures on the uh on the top side they look they pop up, they look dull, you know.

SPEAKER_01 43:40

The layers of the of the rock, I guess, and how the the color stands out versus the gray looks really good. Okay, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

I love the way they look. I'd love to see one in person.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:51

And interesting fact on those, uh 20 card checklist. Some reason two of them are showing not not being inserted, so those might be held back to. I don't want to get into that. I wonder. Four hobby, four, four are going to be in hobby boxes out of the 20, right? Three of them are going to be in jumbo boxes. There are no supers of that in Breaker's Delight. And 11 are going to be in value boxes. So more than double the what you find in the next closest one.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

And what's the print run on the base version? I've got 91.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

91 copies.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

That's lower actually than the other SSPs, right? So it's interesting that they have like the full parallel rainbow on Crystallized, but it the base version is also pretty SSP compared to the others.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

So when you factor in the parallels, there will what's that? About like 160, 165 or so if you factor in all the parallels.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

Factor them in, right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

Right.

SPEAKER_02 44:40

170.

SPEAKER_00 44:41

Well, our next one on the checklist. Yeah, and I just love these SSPs. Um in Spotlight, 15 cards. There's Nolan McClean and 14 other guys that you can talk about. But I want that Nolan McClean card so bad. It's just him pointing at the sky. I've seen the mock-up for it. Um, but these come in red and super, just instead of doing you disservice and not going over the other guys. Um you have Arquette again, Florentino. Uh, you got Aloy for the Orioles, Ethan Holliday. You have Roman Anthony, Cam Schlitler, Jack Keggs.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

This one skews rookies more so than the other ones.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

Yeah, absolutely. I don't see any vets really, Colson Montgomery. Yeah. Um yeah, rookies and prospects. That's it. That's what we're looking at, which I'm okay with.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

I'll tell you one thing that I'm interested in monitoring with this release for some of these bigger rookies. Take like uh take kegs. Kegs already has a spotlight, right? He got one in 24 draft. I'm not sure if he had one in any 25 product. He might have. But I'm curious to see how the base spotlight rookie card does versus his 2024 draft spotlight. Like that how those singles do is a really interesting thing to me. Which one would you rather have? His first one or the one with the rookie card? Because the first one doesn't have a first on it. If it did, like that would probably play into the equation a little bit, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

What are your thoughts on Spotlight as far as you know, they used to be a little bit more common than they are? And you know, they're they look too good to have been a common insert. So what what do you think about the market in general as you know?

SPEAKER_01 46:20

I can't remember who told me this or how it came up in conversation, but I remember vividly somebody saying that they talked to somebody at Topps who's involved in the build out of the product, and they were talking about how cool spotlights are. And when they first released them in 2023, Bowman, they were extremely common. It was just like a normal insert. What was it, like two per box or something like that? Like they were they were flying out left and right, super high PR. And then they found that everybody really liked them a lot. And so they after that release, they decided to SSP them for pretty much every Bowman release after that. And the guy I was saying, you can't put rarity back in the tube in a collector's mind. And I thought that was really interesting because we all know that spotlights, based on how rare they are and how cool they are, don't do the kind of numbers on singles that you'd expect them to do. Right. And I just, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:07

I feel like it tugs them from both directions, right? Like the newer ones being tougher to hit, in a way, make the older, more common ones a little bit more expensive than they would have been. But on the in the same token, the newer ones that are tougher to hit don't carry the value they would you know if they didn't have the more common ones in in the past.

SPEAKER_01 47:25

Yeah, we it's kind of like all aces, right? But you've seen with the all aces, like the new ones do really carry a ton of value. Right. And the old ones also have jumped up a ton. Yeah, I would love to see the same thing happen with Bowman spotlights. I hope it does, but I there may be an opportunity there.

SPEAKER_02 47:40

You know, we've seen it with the um the home field advantage. Those have been fairly common for for quite a while. Prick runs are usually something between like five and eight, eight, nine thousand on each of those, right? And now they're tough. Starting, what was it last year? Recently, they're they're a lot tougher, right? There's only a few hundred of them.

SPEAKER_03 47:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

So now, and it it kind of started a little bit before this 26 product came out. They started kind of going up a little bit. People started seeing, like, well, these are kind of similar to downtowns, maybe even cooler. And there's, you know, like so. I they started to kind of slowly rise. And then that 26 product came out when they're truly SSPs. And then we saw the the market rise even more on those older ones. I like to see that. It's not like there were 15,000, 20,000 of them. I mean, they were still, it was still like a case hit, basically. It's just there was a lot of cases, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I love spotlights. They're my favorite, just uh purely on aesthetics of all these SSPs. I think spotlight's my favorite. It just it's very classic, it's very simple. It focuses on the player. No name, no, no, no team logo, no other logos on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:45

Well, you'll be happy to know there are more spotlight super fractors in value boxes than there are in hobbies and jumbos combined. Three three of the supers in hobby, three in jumbo, and eight of them in the value boxes. Crazy. Which leaves one still out there somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

You know, I I went on the only Bowman purchases I've made so far today. I bought five cases of blasters and now I'm I'm kind of glad that I did. This reinforces that I was starting to think, is that the buy? I think it really is.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

Yeah. And the more we talk about it, it's almost like the SSPs make that worthwhile, you know. I mean, it's a go in with tempered expectations. Don't expect them to knock your socks off. That's all I've been trying to tell people after I posted the videos of me ripping one. You know, if you're if your expectations are real, you're gonna be surprised sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

You know, along with the uh red rookies, yeah. I think that boosts them too.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

It's like you're joining a break of it. It's so slow. And if you have a slow, if you have a you know a short attention span, it's not for you. You're also probably not gonna get a whole lot of like the super high-end quality hits. I mean, you might get the SSPs. It sounds like the superfractors are actually pretty evenly distributed across all the configurations, but you know, you're not gonna get a whole lot of gold refractors or black refractors or red refractors.

SPEAKER_02 49:56

Like those are gonna be I got one gold out of the case I opened. One gold refractor, one SSP. And uh the numbers said that my case was well below average. They calculated at two, you know, the the we were talking about the quality hits metric that I have, and that's standard across everything, so I can compare different formats and different products, right? Even though some are more valuable. And I know there's, you know, you're gonna have extremely valuable autos that are numbered to 150. Well, those aren't account as a quality hit in my metric, just so that I can compare and contrast better. I understand there's there's holes in it, right? But I so quality hits should fall one in eight blaster boxes. So you should see five in a case, and I got two. So just that right there alone tells you that like I can tell my case was not a good case. It was below average. So that's you know, people are saying it was it was underwhelming. Well, it was, it was absolutely underwhelming, and the numbers show that it was underwhelming, you know.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

But high floor. I mean, look at some of these sales that you made already, and you made a good chunk back of your your cost.

SPEAKER_02 51:01

Absolutely. The I've got another one coming, it'll be here tomorrow. I'll probably rip it too, and I may even order some more.

SPEAKER_00 51:06

I don't know. Right on. Good luck. There are two more SSPs that I want to talk about. They are not technically inserts, but the first one is the Etchon glass. So these we have 11 prospects for Esching glass and 12 uh rookies for this. So 23 total cards. As far as the rookies go, um, we have Chase Burns, Roman Anthony, Ms. Jack Keggs, Bubba Chandler, and Nolan McClean, some of the nice ones. And then for the prospects, it is Ethan Holliday, uh Arquette, Florentino, Aloy, Andrew Fisher, just a few of the big names that you could find there. But again, that's just 11 cards for that one. Yeah, any any thoughts on the etched in glass, which I I've been pretty lucky. I've actually been able to hit a couple of those um over the past year or so. How do they look in person? Do they have a nice refractor shine to them? I feel like they they could look sharper, you know. I I'm a little underwhelmed by them. Like I always they always seem like they're in the wheelhouse of a car that I'd be looking for in terms of style and everything, but honestly, in person, it just seems it's a little underwhelming to me.

SPEAKER_02 52:14

They've done some really nice stained glass type, you know, parallels in the past of different products. So, you know, it'd be nice to see those that way. All right.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

And then the last one, again, this is technically just a parallel, um, but this is new this year. The pack practical variation, this is for all 150 prospects, uh, prospects only. And these are out of 89. Of course, they're prospect only because there are no chrome parallels for vets and rookies. Uh, these, if you look at the background of this, it's based off of the 1989 Bowman packs, hence C out of 89. And I think that these look awesome. I would like to see them in person to really see how they pop, or maybe even like just not a mock-up. Be really interested to see that, but I'm very excited for these. I think it's a great idea. You know, it's not just another color or another, you know, minor color with a slightly different style, like a wave or shimmer or lava. This it reminds me of like when they introduced greengrass, just something really cool to to look at and add to the parallels where you you would be excited about this head still.

SPEAKER_02 53:19

I'm with you, Juice. I I like those. That was my wheelhouse, man. 1989. I remember I opened those packs. Big, big cards that wouldn't fit in the sleeves. I think I'm a little bit older than you guys, maybe. So I was uh like 13 years old, ripping 89 Bowman, looking for the Griffey and so I like it. I dig that that that you know pack background.

SPEAKER_01 53:37

That's awesome. Throwback. Nostalgia always works in the hobby. You know, I think they and when when they pick their when they pick their spots, it's great. I think this was a great spot to pick. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

I like it. It helps out it's a great looking pack, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:50

The other parallel that stands out to me too is uh the Bowman logo fractor out of 35. Um, are they actually gonna have the Bowman logo?

SPEAKER_02 54:01

Oh yeah, I remember that. It was just uh just a plain looking refractor wasn't out of 35.

SPEAKER_00 54:06

It Bowman draft, uh yeah, for those that don't know. Yeah, they did not have the actual Bowman logo on it. And then I think their customer service doubled down, which I can't blame them because customer service gets a very good thing.

SPEAKER_01 54:17

It's a little different in draft because the refractors are unnumbered, but now that you know it's Bowman and the refractors are numbered out of 499, it's gonna look real weird if you have another parallel that looks exactly the same and it's just numbered out of 35.

SPEAKER_02 54:28

So do we know those are numbered to 35?

SPEAKER_01 54:31

That's what a solution checklist that I'm looking at. That's I assume that they must have that in the sell sheet because they're certainly not doing the math to back into like you are.

SPEAKER_02 54:40

Yeah. I I don't know. They they get information sometimes that's just not available to the public. So sometimes they'll they'll mess with that.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

I've got a little higher on the print run on those than 35, but I don't know. Sometimes that means the checklist is is checklist size is weird. I don't know. I've got like 65. Not saying like there's a lot of reasons mine can be off, but usually it's something like that, a weird checklist size or whatever. So is that gonna be all the base cards have that refractor? Is that just a parallel that they all have?

SPEAKER_01 55:14

For the base chrome prospects, yeah. For the chrome prospect autos, it's uh on the pack fractors, it's uh it's a subset. It's not all the 87 Chrome Prospect Autos. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:24

Well, next up, let's talk about autos. So, yes, these are the hits that you are looking for. Uh, we will start with the Chrome Prospect Autos, the most common hits that you can expect. This is a checklist of 87 cards, and yeah, you're gonna find the big first Bowman guys that we talked about, Ethan Holiday, Florentino. But yeah, listen to those previous episodes to really get the breakdown on that. This episode is already super long, so I don't think we should spend too much time on that, even though it is the most exciting part of it. It's just honestly that there's not much more to talk about that we haven't already talked about for this.

SPEAKER_01 56:01

Yeah, I think my only question or thing to point out here as we're doing the checklist rundown is the calling out some of the new parallels. So black and white shimmer refractor. I'm assuming that's gonna be the red ink refractor that we saw in Bowman Chrome. Love those. Love those.

unknown 56:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

Now, the black and white autos that are unnumbered always have really sneaky low print runs. They're just unnumbered, so you can't, you I mean, you can tell that they don't come out very often, right? But I don't think a lot of people really understand how truly rare they are. Uh in the past, they've been something like, you know, 25, 26 copies of each, you know.

SPEAKER_01 56:35

Remember the old light boxes they used to put those in? That whole light box experiment was interesting. I don't think people like that very much. So it'd be interesting to see. Are these do you know if they're red ink or not, juice? Or I have no idea.

SPEAKER_00 56:48

I I have not seen it.

SPEAKER_01 56:49

They probably are.

SPEAKER_02 56:50

So I see there's a chrome prospect autograph black and white shimmer.

SPEAKER_00 56:54

The next up we have is the chrome prospect gold ink autograph. These are back. 47 cards, these are beautiful. Hopefully, they did a better job of the ink not looking so scratchy and faded on some of these like we saw last time. Um, but yeah, you have a 47 card checklist of not just the first Bowman guys, but some guys we dug into this a little bit last time, but guys like um Eli Willitz, he does he is back in this with another auto. Um, so yeah, you have a mix of first Bowman guys. Kevin McGonagall has one, Connie Griffin. So yeah, very interesting to see.

SPEAKER_02 57:38

Uh I hope they fix that ink issue because those are to me, those are some of the best looking cards in the hobby. I think they look absolutely fantastic. They they kind of butchered it with the ink last year, but if they if they fix that, I I think these should be extremely valuable.

SPEAKER_03 57:52

Mm-hmm for sure.

SPEAKER_00 57:53

Yeah, these are just beautiful cards. I've yet to see one in person. Hopefully I'm lucky enough someday. But yeah, these these cards can really they can really stand out on the PC, I think. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 58:04

The coolest part about them is that they're actually two texture, kind of like the reptilians a little bit, but it it goes from the matte to the glossy. And that's me, kind of that two-texture look on the gold ink is what makes them look super cool when you get them in hand. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

Next up we have going back to pack frats like we talked about before, these are new, but they also have autos. Uh, we have 39 cards for this. Healthy checklists of guys. You got a lot of the a lot of the big first bowman guys, and then we do have a lot of guys that are not first bowman, same like the gold inks, uh griffin, Kevin McGonagall again for again, for example, Eli Willets, but you do have Ethan Holiday. Do we have yes, we do have Florentino, Arquette. So, yeah, we got we got all the names that we want to see, plus more. So I'm happy with that checklist. Yeah, so so those are cool, and then we have a lot of people are gonna be chasing these, but not a lot of people are gonna be hitting these. The Chrome rookie autos. This is just 13 cards, also. So the odds of hitting these are very small, but also a lot of it is because it is just 13 cards compared to the how many do we say? 87 cards for the prospect autos. So, yeah, these are just crazy hard to hit. Uh, Corey's about to give us the numbers on those, and yeah, but you have you do have some nice rookies here. You got Jack Heggs, Chase Burns, Murakami, that's gonna be the chase, Sal Stewart, Roman Anthony, missing Nolan McLean. But with just 13 guys, you're not gonna have all of them. But the good thing is that they're pretty good names overall. No, yeah, missing Mizurawski. No Mizuraowski. All right. Slab squatch, let's hear it. How hard are these gonna be to actually hit?

SPEAKER_02 59:51

Well, the odds are extremely long. Uh one in 1439 hobby packs. The base auto is gonna be right around 500 on the print run. Now there is a refractor at a 499. So, you know, there's gonna be pretty close to the same number in existence. It'll be very interesting to see what that um miracomi goes for. I think that'll be a huge card, even the base, you know, and especially the the parallels of that. That's that's gonna be huge. He is uh a redemption, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:15

Is it okay for Chrome Rookie Auto's Squatch? Is there anything is there anything that you're able to infer from Tops' published odds about how many of these guys might be short printed? What I mean by that, are there any of these guys that might not have one or multiple parallels at all? Maybe one player only has like golden down, or one player has refractor and blue and gold and nothing else.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:40

So I have to assume what you're saying is accurate, right? I have to assume that, especially in the unnumbered autos, that's you know, certain guys have more than others. Some guys are shorter printed. Maybe with the rookies, it's not as bad as this if there were, you know, also superstars in the same set. Same way you mentioned with there's probably some that don't have certain parallels, but there's nothing in the odds sheet that's gonna tell me that. I don't have any definitive numbers on that because my numbers are averages, and there's not really any way, nothing in the odds that will tell me who is it has nothing to do with names, right? It's all numbers, it's all this many divided by that many. There's no names involved whatsoever in the odds.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:20

Right. Yeah. I feel like in Bowman sometimes with these chrome rookie autos, but I feel like as a breaker who's opening up, you know, 50 plus cases in a release week, so I get to see a good amount of rookie autos. I feel like I always see the same damn ones when they're base rookie autos, and they tend to be the worst guys on the checklist. So I I say this cautiously, like the first time tomorrow when I sweat a chrome, a base chrome rookie auto, I'm gonna be feeling like this is gonna be an Alex Freeland or a CJ Cafis, probably, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:47

Like it's probably not gonna be a Roman or a it makes me wonder how much of that is due to just collation and you know, regional collation, and how much is due to just actual scarcity of those players? As the rookies, I mean I I see I'm sure they would do it as a it's a it's a a revenue thing, right? I mean, uh uh Otani is gonna cost them a lot more to sign an auto than a CJ Caifus, right? But if they're all rookies, how much how much variance could there be when it comes to that, right? I don't know. I mean, maybe some guys are more expensive than others, they're not gonna be crazy high, you wouldn't think, as rookies. I mean, especially the prospects, those guys gotta be super cheap. They're probably paying them 50 cents an auto or something, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

So, next up we have the draft pick pairings autos, and we talked about this uh been in the last few episodes. This is 16 cards, and this is new. So these are guys that were taken in the same spot in the draft. So, like first overall pick, pair with another first overall pick, second with a second. So, a lot of interesting pairings here. The idea is cool, but it just I don't know about the execution of it. I'm like Travis Bazanna, Eli Willitz is cool. Lineford, Nick Hurts. I I also kind of like Jack Keggs, Jacob Wilson. That's another okay one. But but we got some weird.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:04

I will say, as a Mariners fan, there is a Wamper on here.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:07

I agree. That's one I was eyeballing too.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:09

A-rod and griffy, yeah. Uh and it's let's see them.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:12

If these are on card, I don't know. Have you seen any yet? Either of you guys, I've seen them. I can't remember if they're on card, uh, but I have seen a rendering.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:20

Yeah, I mean, if they're on cards. Because even like the super high-end dynasty definitive diamond icons and stuff like that, there aren't a ton of Griffy A-rod on card autos out there, duels, and uh, that's just very nostalgic for me growing up in the 90s in Seattle.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:35

So these are gonna be rare. I've got it's weird because the print run comes out to 17 on the base, but then I see on the Beckett side it says all cards are 25 or fewer. So that would make sense. Some are gonna be 25, some are gonna be less. So, like the average is gonna be like 17.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:49

Right. Which makes me think that maybe they're on card because that's a whole different price to get an on-card auto versus a sticker.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:55

Yeah, I would have been half of them are redemptions if that's the case. Yeah, they love it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:00

By the way, have you seen the new redemption cards? Yes. Wow, topps is really stepping in.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

Please share. I haven't seen it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:08

They totally redesigned the redemption.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

It's no longer like that blue. Yeah, with the regular text and stuff like that. They they fancified it a little bit. They made it, they added some like fancy font for redemption, and I don't know. It looks it looks all right.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:25

Well, you know, the used redemption sell for way more than they should anyway, so maybe they'll just sell up even more, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:30

One of the skeeziest things to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:32

Yeah, yeah. Can't believe what people sell those for. I wouldn't even try and sell one, and there's people paying 100 bucks for them, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:39

There's a market for it, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:41

So you in the market for that Griffey A-rod card, Bert?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:44

I don't know, man. I probably won't be. I'll be hoping that I get to pull it, but I hope that you pull it too, Bert. If it's on card, it's gonna be out of my price range.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:51

I have Griffey with I have Griffe with Bert tomorrow. I'm hoping. Speaking into existence. Yes. So then we have like the more base insert autos. Uh we have Bowman Sterling autographs, electric sluggers, under the radar autos, and power cord autos. Those are probably all gonna be stickers. I don't really want to spend too much time on them. They're anywhere from 10 to 15 cards. Uh, a lot of cool players and stuff, but you know that there's really just not much to talk about as far as those go. And they're pretty rare.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:22

Yeah, yeah, they're they're they're rare. Low print runs, even the base.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:27

Bowman sterling ones.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:28

Looks like most of them are numbered. Bowman Sterling.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

I'm looking at one of the Bowman Sterlings on eBay.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

The checklist I'm looking at is all weird.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:35

I think I'm on lit.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:35

Yeah, we're getting we're getting some delay, but it's recorded natively on your computer, so it'll it'll figure it out for us.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:42

Sticker insert autos.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:44

The highest number on those sterlings is 99.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:46

And uh we have the uh retailings.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:49

The sticker kills it for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:51

Retail autos, I'm not gonna spend any time on. Uh those are paper autos. Um, you can find prospects, rookies, mets, and then ultimate autograph booklet. It's 24 guys, I believe. You hit this, uh, you're having a good day. Very rare. It's a huge thing. Um, and all American game autos, we see uh these every year. There's just one card, it's Ethan Holiday. Again, really cool card to hit. It's gonna be, I'm sure, stupidly rare, but at least it is a great player, Ethan Holiday. So, yeah, let's uh let's wrap this up. First, let's talk about rip it, flip it, or break it. And as our guest, Slap Squatch, Corey, I will let you lead. Are you ripping this? Are you flipping it or are you breaking it?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:33

Well, I um do have a section on this in my write-ups. This is uh one of the things I try to focus on to you know help other people out a little bit. Um, I am ripping value boxes for sure. I've already ripped a case, I've got another one coming, I'll probably ripping it too. To me, that's gonna be the easiest rip in the product. It's kind of the best floor. It may not have the highest ceiling, but it's it's a safe rip. 30 bucks a box, right? I mean, better chance the case hits. So I'm definitely ripping value boxes. If I run across a decent deal on hobbies, I might I might grab a couple of those. I think it's uh there's a point to be made for ripping any of this, right? If it's in your price range, this none of this is a bad rip. I mean, this isn't this isn't gilded, right? It's one of the worst rips there ever has been. So I'm fine with ripping any of this. I'll be ripping value boxes, maybe hobby. And I also say this is a it may not spike in price, it may not double in price right out the gate, but Bowman's always a slow burn, man. Like a year from now, they're gonna be double the price they are now, you know. So if you're sealed, yeah. If you're see if you're a stasher, if you're if you hold sash-shield wax, you can't go wrong. I mean, get what you can at the at the initial pricing and let it sit in the vault, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:42

Yeah, I'm same same as you. It's Bowman. You you really can't go wrong with how you want to enjoy this. If you get the most joy out of ripping it so that you have a really good chance at getting one of those big guys or whatever you want to do, uh, if you want to hold it and and flip it, yeah. I I would not recommend really just trying to flip this right off the bat. I think uh with Bowman, like you said, it's gonna be a slow burn. You gotta you gotta wait it out. But if if you're someone that's looking to do that, great. And then the only thing with breaking is do your research. Make sure you can get value for the money that you're spending if you're doing it, because yeah, there's a lot of info out there. Um, even if you're not listening to this podcast, I definitely recommend checking out Prospects Live uh or Big Bob's cards for for that information. But wherever you get whatever you're doing, if you're breaking it, if you're looking to get into breaks, make sure you do your research, make sure it's money well spent and find your deals because there are deals to be had if you look in the right places.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:40

Rip it for me. If you're able to get it at uh pre-order pricing, or if you're able to get some on release day pricing, grab yourself a hobby box and rip it. I think for me, I that's the most fun about Bowman. It's a long checklist. There's lots of different fun little nuggets, you know. I think it's nice being able to rip a personal because you never know what's gonna come out and you don't want to limit yourself to one team or one name. I think I lean a little bit more rip than break on Bowman for that reason. I'll be I'll definitely be ripping some personals and probably some blasters with Squatch.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:11

Like it. And um, all right, so now our final thoughts and our grade. So I'm gonna start with visual. I'm giving this a seven out of ten. It's clean design. I understand the Panini Prism comparisons, but I'm just throwing that out. Yeah, I think that it's it looks good. It's nothing revolutionary, you know, it's it's nothing crazy outside the box, but yeah, it gets the job done. I do like the addition of the pack factor. The SSP inserts are all great looking as usual, but there's really nothing that they did really new to really separate it as oh man, this is visually the Bowman product that we're gonna be looking back at. So yeah, just just a solid seven out of 10 for me.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:55

If we were talking just the base design, I'm not a huge fan. Uh it'd be a little lower, but to me, uh the appeal of this product is not the base, it's everything else, which I think they've knocked it out apart. So I'm gonna go with an eight just on overall design. I I love some of the some of the inserts, I love some of the parallels. Just I just think they look phenomenal. And I also think that one of the knocks against tops in the past is when they just haven't landed on a good case hiss like Panini. Like that's how Panini outclassed them. And now I I gotta disagree like a hundred percent. I think they've really landed on some great ones, and I like them far better than I've ever liked any of the Panini case hits.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:34

And the Bowman basketball case hits that they're doing too are on the singles market are doing pretty insane numbers too. So I'm hoping that basketball actually lifts up the Bowman baseball a little bit because you know, Panini heads have always been about the case hits, not so much Bowman heads, but uh hopefully that that changes with time. I don't know, man. For me, I I'm kind of with squatch. If I were to rate just the base design, I'm kind of like a three or a four. I think it looks just like Prism. I don't love that. The only redeeming quality to me is that the full border. I always like a full border on a Bowman card. I just wish it wasn't super jagged like this one is and it was a little bit more straight and rectangular like a 2020 Bowman was. My favorite design ever. But I think I think like the SSPs are great, and uh I think some of the insert autos do actually look really good too. So I think overall, probably a five or a six.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:21

Next up, we have short-term value. I'm gonna go with an eight out of ten on this. Bowman, it always has a nice value to it if you can get it for retail, of course. It will be an easy flip where you know that you can at least make a little bit, but Bowman, it's always more of a long-term hold if you're really trying to make money. Yeah, as far as the singles go and everything on the short-term value, we have some really nice names here, and we have Murakami as a rookie really propping up that rookie class quite a bit right now, and a lot of other rookies to be excited about. But yeah, I I give this, I think that uh you can continue to get a saw about value out of this Bowman product. You need to go or you go, both? Yeah, Corey, I'll I'll I'll pass it to you. Yeah, we'll we'll stay in order now.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:04

I like this release better than probably any Bowman release for in in in years. Oh, wow. I just think it's got both it's got the the rookies and the prospects. I mean, I think the prospect class is as strong as any that we've had recently. Um, and the rookies are stronger. Like this blows last year's out of the water to me on the rookie side, right? So as far as short term, I think I think there's plenty of value there for short term because of some of those huge names. So, I mean, the long term, I think we'll get into that, but short term, I like it. I like it a lot. I think I'm gonna give it an eight and a half on short term.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:39

Yeah, same. I'm I'm kind of same in that same neighborhood. I'll give it a seven. We talked about it with Big Bob on one of the previous podcasts, but it's so interesting. The timing of the year that Bowman comes out is kind of the first quarter of the season. A lot of these international prospects are getting their first state side at bats. We got baseball going all the time. So the short-term value is going to be very up and down for a lot of these prospects on an individual basis. And to me, that makes it a lot of fun. I think right now with the way that Murakami is lifting up this rookie class, even though that Roman and Kegs are both kind of struggling a little bit, it's a it's a very strong, deep rookie class. And Florentino at the top of the prospect class is something special. And I trust Bob's take on that. Yeah, I think it's pretty strong short-term. Seven.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:21

All right, next up we have long-term value. And this is the first time we've done our final thoughts on a Bowman product with first Bowman prospects in it. And the thing is, long-term value is just so difficult for a product like this because you just never know. That's pretty much what we say with every product, but especially on Bowman, because prospects are such an unknown. Um, you know, the this value, it could go, it could skyrocket because one of these guys just totally went off and looks like he's gonna be the next Iron Judge or something, or everyone just flames out. Um, like I forgot what year it was, Austin Martin's year, Bowman. So yeah, that one just sank like a stone. So I'm just gonna go with a conservative seven out of ten. Uh Florentino, of course, right now he seems like a name that could really prop it up. And of course, Murakami, uh, but he's gonna have more cards coming out, more rookie cards, and then of course, is Topps Chrome is really gonna be the card for him when that comes out. So that I could take away from this a little. But yeah, I I think seven out of ten is just a conservative estimate for for where this product will be long term.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:25

Yeah, I gotta lean pretty high on this one too. Um, I think the depth is there. I think in a year we're maybe talking about some different guys that have kind of snuck into the mix and maybe a couple of them fell off. Um it's usually the way it works. Um, but I think that enough depth is there both in the rookies and the prospects that I think long term this should be, this should not be another 2021. Pretty high on I'm gonna give up a seven as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:47

Yeah, the market is in such a crazy place right now with wax prices. You know, when you ask about long-term value, I'm thinking about kind of a year and two years from now, if you're gonna sit on a sealed case or something that, on something like that as an investment, I would probably proceed with caution a little bit with this release just because the prices are already so high. We talk about Bowman aging like a fine one, and that's true in most cases. However, with the entry cost right now on secondary already being as high as as it is, it makes me wonder what how much room for margin is there in like a one or a two-year flip. I go to and look at 2025 Bowman. Yes, they are up since last year at release, secondary cost, but not by that much. And that prospect checklist has turned out to be extremely special with the way that Kevin McGonagall and J.J. Weatherholz are coming out the gate. Um, some of the guys that didn't have first autos, like Connor Griffin and um and Kurtz and some of those guys too. So I don't know. I think I'm more at like a five for long-term value. And the only reason why is because of where the market is at right now and more of like those macro effects than than anything specifically about the checklist.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:55

Can I ask you a question, Bert? What do you is it if you can get a uh as a consumer, if you can get a case of this on drop day, whether it be you know 12 loose boxes or whatever, of the hobbies, is that a no-brainer buy? Is that pretty much you're gonna do that?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:08

It's a no-brainer buy. Definitely. I think it's a no-brainer buy if you could get it at the 250 tops.com price for a hobby box. If you could get a case of hobby, you have you're gonna have margin if you want to part with it fairly quickly. If you want to sit on it for a year or two, I don't see them going much lower than 250 a box, even if things don't go right with this checklist. There's just too much depth to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:30

I throw my hat in the ring and we'll have to see what happens, you know. I don't expect any the L's come in bunches.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:35

I would just be no, totally. I would just be hesitant at like going out and buying a case right now on David Adams on release day. Like as an investment, probably stay away from that.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:43

Yeah. Next up, we have breaking. I'm gonna give this an out of 10. I love player breaks for Bowman. Um, I think it's just a great way to target your PC players, and also I hate targeting rookies in Bowman. So that really helps you just because they're so tough to hit. Like you said, there's no Chrome parallels for them. And then the autos, there's just 13 of them that actually have autos. Then to even see one, you know, unless you're doing a five, 10 case break, you're probably not even gonna see one until you start getting into those. But if you can get in before prices get out of control for this, there are definitely some sneaky buys before people catch on to the different sleepers and stuff. Prices can vary so much between breakers sometimes. So you can definitely find some sneaky buys. But for player breaks, like it's just so much fun for me, especially when you get the guys that have like the different SPs and stuff. So, yeah, eight out of 10. Really fun breaking product. And then just one thing to beware about with breaking. I always like to caution this with uh Bowman, especially make sure you know if they ship paper or not. Um, and if they don't ship paper, make sure that they're disclosing that just because you just don't want to deal with someone that's not giving you all that information. And if they're not shipping paper, hopefully it's a separate spot so that it brings down the cost of the case overall for you as the buyer. And then of course, if you want to buy that spot, good for you. You can actually make some good money there if you're willing to do team sets and stuff. But yeah, just a word of caution if you're new to breaking. Uh, sometimes they don't ship actually most of the time with Bowman, they actually don't ship paper, you're just gonna get the Chrome cards. But uh, you will get the paper parallels though, just not base paper. All right, with that, uh Corey, I'll move it to you. How are you feeling about breaking?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:21

I like this one for breaking, um, simply because I think kind of the beauty is in the eye of the beholder on this, right? In a lot of products, it's it's pretty easy. Oh, this is your expensive team. This one's the cheapest team because it there's it's just the right answer, right? Like this is the strongest checklist. This is like it's like how how much do you weight SSPs? How much do you weight, you know, rookie autos since they're so hard to hit? There's a lot of different things to factor in here. And I think that can add to the to the sneakiness that you're talking about. I think there's some good teams in a break that are going to be in that middle tier, you know, that aren't gonna be some of the most expensive ones. When I break, I I'm usually not I'm not resting on the I'm not at the high end of it. You know, I'm looking for the middle low teams that actually have some some chance to hit. And I think this offers good value in some of those teams. So I'd be pretty high on this on a break. I don't do a ton of breaks, but you know, I I do jump in some occasionally. I've jumped in some of Burr here recently. I'd be in an eight on this for breaking.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:20

It happens three times a year. Bowman, Bowman Chrome, Bowman Draft. Bowman is probably my favorite of the three, honestly, just given the mix, given the SPs, given the ch the fact that it's a lot of these rookies, for one of some of their first rookie autos, and the product has the the market hasn't been flooded, you know, with the 25 rookie autos that a guy eventually has by the time draft comes out or even chrome comes out. But I think the my favorite part from a breaking perspective about Bowman is that everybody and their mom is breaking it from the top of the top Fanatics live breakers running 100 casers and multiple or 30 case PYTs, all the way down to somebody who's just doing it for fun with their friends that picked up, was lucky enough to get a case on pre-order and can open it up before release day. Everyone is breaking it. And with that, a lot of people that are running pick them breaks, whether it's pick your player or pick your team. The variance in pricing is so large between different breakers. And a big part of the fun there is finding those diamond in the rough deals. You know, you find somebody that a breaker that might have mispriced a spot to 50% of what another guy has it. You could pounce on those kind of deals, keep your eyes open. There's lots of different places to join breaks, and uh sometimes you could find some good deals that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:32

The other thing, I'm trying not to spend too much time on this because we're already so long in this episode. The other thing that I love about breaking with Bowman is that the pricing of teams varies so much from a Topps product. Yankees in this is not going to cost as much as Yankees in a traditional Topps product because you're chasing prospects. So if you're like a Yankee fan and you're always outpriced for breaks, you can come to Bowman and you you might not see that. So I always like your Rockies fan, you're kind of screwed, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:00

Like you never have to pay much. Now you're the most expensive team in the product. That's true.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:07

All right. And last thing I want to grade is checklist. I'm giving this an eight out of 10. I think we have a very nice prospect checklist overall. We've talked to Max and Bob, and they they seem to agree that it's it's a really strong checklist that we're getting in this year for prospects, and that's what you really want to see when it comes to Bowman. I do like it when you're headlined by one big name where you know that is the guy. And Florentino has that pedigree right now where he is the guy. That's the guy that you really, really want to go for to headline the product. And then you do have Ethan Holliday as well, where it's a more no name, a more well-known name among collectors. So that's cool. And then you have some rookies to be excited about too, which which is great. Uh, so I I think it's a very solid checklist. Eight eight out of ten.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:59

I give me an eight, too. You guys know more about the checklist than I do, but I I mean, I I can see the depth, I can see the good rookies, I can see the good the prospects. I mean, it's it's hard to go wrong with that. I'll take an eight on that too.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:10

I'm gonna go a little bit more conservative. I'm gonna go with a six. I think 2025 is a big uh bar to live up to. Um, you see how some of these guys, some of these prospects have ended up performing at the big league level and how some of them are performing at the minor league level still with Mate, Peña, Vintero, etc., Thomas White. I think that Florentino is a better headliner, like Bob said, than anybody was at the time of release of 2025 Bowman. But I think when you look at like two through seven, it's not nearly as strong. I I go back to Big Bob's list where he had May 3rd of last year, he put out his top 200 hitter rankings, and there were seven in his top 50 that had first autos in 2025 Bowman. This year in 2026 Bowman, only two in the top 50. I don't know. I think that kind of speaks volumes and um I'm hoping that this one pops just like 2025. I'm just not I'm not as optimistic necessarily on the prospect checklist for this one. Um I've seen what happens to bad Bowman checklists before. I've been through 2021 Bowman, so I know it can happen, although it hasn't happened for some time.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:14

Okay. Well, that about does it for our 2026 Bowman breakdown in coverage. You we are now what seven episodes in into this? Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, and thank you for sticking with us through this really long episode. And then again, thank you so much, Corey Slab Squatch. Um, do you want to tell people one more time where they can find you?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:36

On X, um, Slab Squash Sports Cards or at Waxmetrics, M-E-T-R-I-X. And then uh Substack is also Slab Squash Sports Cards. That it was we we dig deep, we we do deep dives. Uh, you know, have some time set aside if you want to dig into some of them because I I go pretty deep on some of these numbers. So I'm a nerd at heart, numbers guy, and that that's what I do.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:58

I think it's safe to see.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:59

Well, thanks for everything that you do for the community, man. Seriously, I think people, if they aren't reading your stuff, they're missing out. Like before you buy any top's products, whether it's a break or a personal, check out Slap Squatch, make sure you get in the lay of the land before you decide which could configuration you're gonna open up of a specific product. And thanks for coming on the cat on the podcast, too, man. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:17

Thanks for having me. It's been a blast. You're welcome back anytime I think it's safe to say. And uh yeah, this is the Talking Cards podcast with Grand Salami and the Juice. I am the juice, and uh have a good night. Happy Bowman Day. Happy Bowman Day