Helping to keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time in the Baseball Card Hobby for the current week. Check out our Discord for more discussion on this and any other hobby chatter - Prospects Live Discord.
This week there are two scheduled releases - 2024 Topps Triple Threads and 2024 Panini Prizm Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Triple Threads
The popular mid-tier product is back for 2024 after a one year hiatus and is scheduled to release on Thursday, December 19th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box, also known as a Master box, comes with two mini boxes/packs of cards. Each pack should contain one auto and one relic plus five base cards, one of which should be a parallel. Boxes will be priced at $449.99. In 2022, the last time we had this product, Topps sold it for $399.99. ***Update - these boxes went through the EQL raffle process and did not get a general public release.
The design is all about the patches. Some of the best patches can be pulled in this product, and it’s one of the cheapest ways to get “high-end” patches that are very desirable. A note of caution is that the patches are a mixture of player worn and game worn, and none of them are associated with a specific game or event. Besides patches, the relic list is full of fun stuff from bat knobs and bat nameplates to laundry tags, manufacturer logos, jersey buttons, and more. As for autos, it will be a mixture of on card and sticker autos. The cards with relics AND autos are expected to be mostly if not all sticker autos.
The checklist has rookies, vets, and ex-MLB players as well as Josh Gibson on the Negro League Homestead Grays. All of the rookie chases are there - Skenes, the Jackson 3, Elly, Jasson, Langford, Yamamoto, and Imanaga. As we’ve seen in various releases this year, Ohtani will be on both the Angels and Dodgers checklist. His relics that were pulled from his 2023 materials are on cards with the Angels team designation, while his base and auto cards are on the Dodgers.
At $450 a box - heck, even at $300 a box, personal rips are more than I am comfortable with doing. That’s partially because the Triple Threads novelty wore off for me, especially as the price increased. Too many sticker autos, to many player worn memorabilia rather than game worn, and pulling desirable rookie cards being the exception rather than the norm, at least in the past, has really turned me off over the years. I feel like my opinion is more than the exception than the norm in the hobby. There was a lot of discontent when Triple Threads did not show up in 2023 with nary a word from Topps. Now that it’s back, there should be plenty of happy collectors out there. If you are one of those, I would recommend the singles approach. Even breaks will be tough given the price point and the smaller number of cards, but I’d rather join a break than buy a box of Triple Threads.
2024 Panini Prizm Baseball
The popular Prizm brand, at least when it comes to football and basketball, will be coming out with 2024 Panini Prizm Baseball on Friday, December 20th.
There is one hobby format - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with three autos per box on average. The Panini pricing is yet to be shown, but Blowout is currently at $174.95 per box. Last year Panini sold Hobby boxes for $135. Retail formats include Blaster/Value boxes at the very least, and I have already encountered those in the wild as of last week at $29.99 per box. ***Update - Panini is selling these boxes for $149.95.
The design is what we’ve seen for Prizm in other sports this year - a very familiar design with full borders and a million different parallels on chrome stock. Autos are all going to be stickers. As for inserts, you can find the ever popular and hard to hit Color Blasts in this product.
The checklist is similar to what we’ve seen from Panini since they’ve gone full unlicensed. That is heavily weighted towards prospects that did not debut in the previous season (2023) and ex-MLB players, with a sprinkling of current MLB players. This means we get prospect cards of players like Paul Skenes, Dylan Crews, James Wood, Jackson Chourio, and Jackson Chourio. Some rookie chases will be Elly De La Cruz and Junior Caminero.
I don’t mind grabbing a blaster of Prizm, or even a personal box or jumping in one break for this product. But it’s not a product to go deep on unless you are chasing a PC rainbow for fun (and not value), and you like trying to do the impossible as there are at least 30 parallels. There’s just no long term value to be had here, so it’s an easy product to pass on, but it’s also a fun rip if you can get it for cheap enough. And that’s what I did, as I did rip one blaster, just like I tend to do every year with this product.