Another year in the baseball card hobby is in the rear view mirror, so you know what time it is. Time to look at the major stories, the market, some quick hits, and my favorite card and product of 2024.

Major Stories

There are none! I made an appearance on the Mojo Breaks podcast (starting around the 23 minute mark) the first week of December for the 2024 Bowman Draft release, and before we got into the Bowman Draft discussion, the host Cody asked my thoughts on the Baseball Card hobby in 2024. My response was essentially that for what has felt like the first time since the Pandemic hit in 2020, the baseball card hobby had stabilized. A lot of the major “gimmicks” that Topps has pushed in the past few years with the exclusive baseball licenses (MVP buybacks, retrofractors, bowman cards that never were like Tom Brady, MLB Debut patch autographs), product lineup changes (the dropping of at least 10 different products in 2023), and license transitions (Panini lost the MLBPA license in 2023 and went full unlicensed) occurred in 2023 or years previous. While other sports and entertainment properties are more in flux in the hobby, especially with the NBA and NFL license transition on the horizon, the baseball card portion of the hobby has found its equilibrium in 2024.

The Market

*Baseball Card Index over the last 12 months*

Last year at this time, we were looking at a drop in the overall Baseball Card Index (via Card Ladder) of over 15% year over year, so seeing basically a 5% drop in 2024 is an improvement! If you zoom out to prior to the Pandemic-fueled boom to gain some more macro perspective, the picture looks a lot rosier. Starting arbitrarily at the beginning of 2019, the Baseball Card Index is up over 170%.

I think the market health narrative all depends on whether you’re a glass half full person or a glass half empty person. I try my best to be the glass half full person and, in that vein, I will say that while we don’t have an actual positive trend, a drop of less than 10% in 2024 is a positive overall. That’s essentially cleaning out some of the final vestiges of the irrational exuberance that we experienced over the past three to four years. And I would not be surprised that as the NFL and NBA exclusive licenses flip over to Fanatics in the next year or so, there’s some upward momentum potential as those collectors re-familiarize themselves with the Topps product line. That can help some potential cross-selling with the existing MLB product line. 2025 will also give us Roki Sasaki rookie cards, and that will have some initial juice for the baseball card market in the first half of the year. If he performs anywhere near the lofty expectations, especially if it’s in a uniform of a highly collectable team, then he alone could drive significant money into the baseball card Hobby and potentially push the Baseball Card Index up to positive territory year over year.

Quick Hits

Paul Skenes MLB Rookie Debut Patch Auto

*2024 Topps Chrome Update MLB Rookie Debut Patch Auto 1/1*

The MLB Rookie Debut Patch Auto debuted in 2023 with 2023 Topps Chrome Update, and it generated quite a bit of interest. In 2024, Topps continued to hype it up, and it is now in the conversation for the most desirable single rookie card of any player that gets one. Paul Skenes, the first overall pick in the 2023 MLB Draft, had an amazing rookie season in 2024. Debuting on May 11th, 2024 - which is the day he wore that patch, Skenes went on to put up one of the best rookie seasons we’ve ever seen from a pitcher, earning him NL Rookie of the Year honors and placing third in the NL Cy Young voting.

With 2024 Topps Chrome Update releasing in November, the Pirates announced an unbelievable bounty. It starts with season tickets for two behind home plate for the next 30 years(!), a softball game for thirty people at PNC Park plus coaching from Pirates alumni, and a Spring Training experience that includes a private tour of the Pirates Spring Training facilities, a meet and greet with Paul Skenes, two Skenes autographed jerseys, taking batting practice and warming up with the Pirates, and other unspecified activities. As if that wasn’t enough, Livvy Dunne, Skenes’s girlfriend, and arguably the more popular half of the couple, especially outside of baseball circles, raised the stakes by offering the person who trades in the card to the Pirates the opportunity to sit with her at a Pirates game in her suite. While the card alone would have easily been worth thousands and thousands of dollars, the trade-in value, especially for a Pirates fan/Pittsburgh resident is beyond a simple cash equation. As of writing, this card has not publicly surfaced, and is likely still sitting in a box of cards waiting to be pulled. If I lived in Pittsburgh, I’m not sure how I would be resisting that chase outside of being broke.

MVP Buybacks

*2023 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani MVP Buyback card eligible for the double buyback*

MVP Buybacks are back for their third year with an added twist of the double buyback for Shohei Ohtani. This was one of the decisions Topps made that I think benefits collectors, card shops, and Topps to one degree or another. The idea, in case you aren’t aware, is that if you have cards of the AL MVP and NL MVP from certain products, you can trade that in for store credit at your participating local card shop or a few mail-in card shops, once those winners are announced in November. Those products are predetermined by Topps, and you only have a certain amount of time to redeem those cards for credit. For the current version of the program, the redemption window runs through January 30th, 2025 and the products included are 2024 Topps Chrome and 2024 Topps Chrome Logofractor Edition.

The breakdown is essentially base cards (or base image variations) of the NL and AL MVP’s (Ohtani and Judge) are worth $20 in store credit, non-numbered refractors are $40, numbered parallels greater than 100 (purple refractor parallels numbered to 250, blues numbered to 150, etc.) are $100, and anything numbered under 100 (greens numbered to 99, golds to 50, etc.) are worth $200. The double buyback twist is that if you trade in a 2023 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani MVP buyback card with the buyback stamp on it (which were packed into 2024 Topps Chrome), you can then trade those cards in for a huge amount of store credit, up to 25 times the value that card had when traded in during the 2023 MVP buyback program - anywhere from $400 to $1,000 in store credit is available for those cards depending on which card it was (refractor, prism, x-fractor, or negative). Not sure how many back-to-back MVP scenarios we’ll see in the future, but I like that Topps took advantage of the situation to add value to this program.

As I said, I really appreciate the approach here. It gives extra value to what are almost always going to be veteran cards for collectors spending money on some of the more expensive mid-tier products. It gives local card shops a boost with moving products off of their shelves with the influx of collectors having store credit. It gives Topps the ability to continue keeping products moving past the small window of their release date, as the majority of products have a short shelf life of interest that last a few weeks at best. This extended shelf life and pumping veteran card value, hopefully gives Topps the impetus to try additional devices that potentially benefit collectors and card shops (and Topps) moving forward.

First Fanatics Fest

*2024 Topps Chrome Fanatics Fest NYC Big Apple Refractor Parallel*

I think card collectors had an unrealistic vision of what the inaugural Fanatics Fest was going to be in August of 2024. I know I did, at least as an outside observer with no intentions of attending the show. I assumed, I think like many others, that this was going to be Topps version of the National Sports Collectors Convention, also known as “The National”. Instead the card collecting aspect from all reports seemed to be more of a minor component of the entire event. It was more of an “experience” around Fanatics various sports properties fueled by brand representatives or “talent” as billed on their website. Headliners in that regard were Tom Brady, Jay-Z, Derek Jeter, Jake Paul, Travis Scott, Lil Baby, Peyton and Eli Manning, Barry Sanders, Mike Tyson, DJ Khaled, and others. Every story and video that came out seemed to focus on the “talent” more than anything else - I rarely saw anything about the actual cards and the “Trading Card Hall”. Some product announcements happened, but it was primarily around Topps further jumping into basketball and football as unlicensed products with strong brands and key checklist players (Wemby, Stroud) as they get ready for the licenses to go into effect in the next few years. There were actually a few trading card exclusives to be found at the show:

2024 Lids x Topps Players Chase Series 1 Mystery Boxes. Each mystery box came with three hats (Lids) and a pack of three Topps cards on chrome stock with vintage to modern Topps designs. Boxes were $250 and found plenty of buyers.
2024 Topps Chrome Fanatics Fest NYC. These were event exclusive boxes with six Big Apple Refractors and one Swinging For the Stars Cosmic Chrome insert per Hobby box (along with one auto).
2024 Topps Cosmic Chrome x Catcus Jack Baseball. - The Travis Scott collaboration was an event exclusive that was limited to 1,000 boxes. It came with 8 cards per box and two parallels - no autos, relics or inserts, so it was purely being driven off of the star power of Travis Scott and the rookies.

Beckett Grading On The Brink?

*December 2024 grading stats from Gemrate*

The facts aren’t good, and if you add in the rumors, you have to wonder how much longer Beckett Grading (BGS) will survive in its current form. First some of the facts. Back in November, Greg Lindberg, the Chairman and CEO of Global Growth, the company that has owned Beckett since 2008, struck a plea deal that lead to him pleading guilty to a $2 Billion money laundering and fraud case. This is on top of a May confirmation of conviction via a retrial that found him guilty of wire fraud and bribery, for which he will be sentenced in combination with his plea deal above. As part of the plea deal, he has/will identify billions of dollars in funds to make restitution for his crimes and theft. One of his financial maneuvers was apparently securing a $100 Million loan with Beckett assets as collateral, and only $500K of that money ending up on the Beckett asset sheet. It’s hard to imagine that there isn’t some sort of negative financial impact to any of the companies in the Global Growth portfolio, including Beckett. As of November, BGS is down 43% in the amount of cards graded compared to how many they graded in November of 2023. December 2024’s numbers came in just under the wire for publishing, and they are slightly better than November, but not much, down 28% over December 2023. They are also consistently ranking fourth of the big 4 card grading companies (PSA, SGC, CGC, and BGS) in the amount of cards they grade on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The usual refrain about poor customer service, poor turnaround times, and under-qualified resources always come up when these negative stories arise about Beckett. It’s hard to ignore those prevailing opinions when you imagine the company is likely in a massive debt hole.

Back when I returned to the Hobby in 2017/2018, BGS was spoken of in the same breath as PSA when discussing card grading companies. At this point, they’ve squandered the majority of that standing within the industry. I would not be surprised if we hear either new ownership with a purchase price of pennies on the dollar, or some form of bankruptcy proceedings for Beckett in 2025. They truly seem on the brink at this point.

Bobby Witt Jr. Custom Cards Wedding Invitation

I’ll be honest - this doesn’t even really qualify as a quick hit. But I just love this story so much that I wrote an article about it. So if you haven’t heard the story yet, Bobby worked with Topps and PSA to create custom cards that doubled as wedding invitations for each of his groomsmen. I like to treat the Hobby as a hobby, and there should always be an element of fun in almost any hobby you participate in. This story is pure fun, and continues to build the legend of how awesome of a guy Bobby Witt Jr. looks to be from an outsider’s perspective. Check out the article for all of the awesomeness.

Favorite Card

I like to own whatever card I choose for my Favorite Card of the Year, which has been true up until this year. That’s because this card is currently selling for north of $300 raw, and variations are still at least north of $100 if not a fair bit more. And that card is the 2024 Topps Series 2 Jackson Holliday Fun Face Short Print. Leading into 2024. Topps Series 2, most of the baseball card Hobby was wondering if the big four rookies that debuted with their MLB teams to start the season (Wyatt Langford, Jackson Merrill, and Jackson Chourio), or within two weeks of the season starting (Jackson Holliday), would make it into the checklist with unannounced base short prints similar to what we’ve seen in the past with J-Rod/Witt/Tork in 2022 and Acuña/Gleyber in 2018 to name some of the more well-known examples. When 2024 Topps Series 2 was starting to be ripped days before the go-live date, as is typically the case with products that have retail components and are produced in the millions of boxes, the base short print rookies of the Jackson 3 and Langford started to appear on social media. Each of the four got a base short print that was notable in as much that it was a short print, but there wasn’t anything really interesting from a photo perspective.

Jackson Holliday, however, got an added bonus - an homage and recreation of the Hobby classic Bill Ripken “F*ck Face” card from 1989 Fleer baseball. Back then, Ripken unknowingly was photographed holding one of his batting practice bats with the infamous F*ck Face written in black ink on the bat knob. Somehow that photo either purposely or accidentally made it’s way through the entire card creation process to land in the 1989 Fleer baseball card set. At some point Fleer decided to do damage control by pulling the original version from production and made numerous attempts at replacing the card with corrected versions. There are at least 14 different corrected versions, all of which are rarer than the original F*ck Face card. However, the Hobby tends to acknowledge six main versions - the original, the black box, the black scribble, the white out, and the white scribble, and the saw cut.

Topps saw their opportunity with Jackson Holliday as a highly touted and well-known Orioles rookie to pay homage to that Bill Ripken Hobby classic. They recreated the photo with the main difference being the shoulder the bat is placed on. That makes sense, as Ripken was a right-handed hitter and Holliday is a left-handed hitter. They actually took photos of Holliday with the bat on the right shoulder as well as seen on their behind the scenes video of the photo shoot, but decided to go with the left-shoulder version. Topps then produced the six variations of the card, but made it a bit more family friendly. The words for Holliday had been changed to Fun Face. So we ended up with a Fun Face, black box, black scribble, white out, white scribble, and saw cut variations of a Jackson Holliday super short print. ***Last minute side note - On January 1st, 2025, Topps posted the actual Fun Face bat knob in a card on their social media account. This looks to be a card that will be coming in the super high-end 2024 Topps Transcendent release, currently scheduled for late January. That card will be VERY desirable.

The Fun Face card is simply Fun, as the name implies, and something that I applaud Topps for doing in 2024. And maybe one day the Fun Face version will be in my price range and I’ll be able to add it to my collection, as I have done with all of my previous Favorite Card of the Year selections.

Favorite Product

*2024 Topps Chrome Update Black Red Lava Lamp auto*

I think if you ask the Hobby in general what their favorite baseball card products of 2024 were, the majority of the answers would likely be something based off of the Chrome Flagship product suite. That includes regular 2024 Topps Chrome, 2024 Topps Chrome Update, and their various editions and derivatives - Logofractor Edition, Sapphire Editions (both Chrome and Chrome Update), Gilded Collection, and Cosmic Chrome. With the strength of the Flagship design, which all of these build off of with the exception of Cosmic Chrome, I can’t blame them. Not to mention the rookie checklists, especially the second half of the year products - Update, Gilded, and Cosmic, and you have a happy Hobby. Sealed product prices reflect that strength as well - 2024 Topps Chrome Update Hobby boxes direct from Topps were $199.99 and Jumbo Hobby boxes were $419.99. Right now on the aftermarket, sealed Hobby boxes are going for over $500 and sealed Jumbo Hobby boxes are going for over $800. Now, some of that is the biggest chase card in the product, the Paul Skenes Rookie Debut Patch Auto discussed above is still not yet known to have been pulled. 2024 Topps Cosmic Chrome sold for $299.99 direct from Topps (through their EQL Raffle process) and is currently going for over $400 a box. Even Topps Chrome, the oldest product released in this list, back in July, is still selling 20% or more over the Topps prices for Hobby and Jumbo Hobby boxes. I think it’s fairly obvious to say the various 2024 Topps Chrome products would take home the general Hobby’s Favorite Product category for 2024.

While I could easily follow suit with the prevailing Hobby opinion and be comfortable saying that, I prefer to explore this topic a bit more. Lets take a look at a few other contenders/usual suspects.

*2024 Topps Stadium Club Paul Skenes Green Parallel*

Topps Stadium Club is a perennial contender for my favorite product of the year. Primarily that is based off the awesome photography, minimal design elements which allow the photography to shine, and affordable price point. Sadly, the 2024 edition has missed the mark for me. The photography was generally good, but there were very few cards that stood out in my opinion. Every year I feel like there’s at least 10 to 20 cards where I think to myself that I would LOVE to have that card in my collection based on the photo alone. This year, I can think of maybe one off the top of my head, and that’s the Elly De La Cruz base card. While the base design kept to the appreciated minimalism, the parallels had a big switch up. Typically just the Stadium Club logo, player info, and minimal design elements would get the parallel color. This year, the entire card is given the parallel color. Sometimes it works, but more often than not, the background elements of the photo are completely lost. And that runs counter to the exact reason many of us are fans of Stadium Club. The price points continue to rise, and there were collation issues on top of everything else (parallels in boxes were often just from a single team). I expected to be talking positively about Stadium Club when it came to my Hobby Year in Review article, like always. Instead, I’m here talking negatively about it and thinking I could have simply left it out of the discussion. But my love for the product and it’s usual inclusion in this article compelled me to give my opinion on it in 2024.

*2024 Topps Holiday Base Short Print Francisco Lindor*

On the more positive side, I was split between two products as my favorite for 2024. Let’s start with the one I did not choose - 2024 Topps Holiday. I’ve been a huge fan of Topps Holiday products since they fully committed to the theme and added fun short prints throughout, starting back in 2019. Prior to that, Topps Holiday was a pretty boring edition of Flagship with a slight nod to the holidays through the use of snowflake type of highlights. No year since 2019 has really put everything together like they did in 2019, even if 2020 through 2023 were still bringing that obvious holiday design and short print fun while never falling back into the pre-2019 boring trap. 2024, however, surpassed 2019 in my opinion. Part of that is the holiday theme implemented on the outer border, in this case a winter, icy blue which they failed to do from 2021 through 2023, leaving the base border completely white in those years. And rather than just do sort of small design elements within the main area of the card, Topps dropped in large neon icon graphics of elves, wreaths, Santa, and stockings. Not to mention the garland/mistletoe that runs all around the inner border to tie it all together. I just love the design, the price points are not going to bankrupt you, and it’s fun to open for kids as well as adults.

*2024 Topps Black & White Paul Skenes base*

My favorite product of the year, for the second year in a row, is 2024 Topps Black & White Baseball. I feel like this is where all of the good photography, that used to be what seemed like the exclusive province of Stadium Club, has migrated to. I had to search eBay thoroughly to find photos of base cards that I didn’t immediately think were great photos to be on a card - the Kirby Puckett, Mike Trout, and Evan Carter base cards were the slim few that I came across that were mildly bland shots. On the other hand, the standouts, especially with the image variations, but even with the base cards, are everywhere in the set. The Paul Skenes and Ozzie Smith base cards are absolute standouts, and as for image variations, the list of awesome cards is pretty much all of them. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, Jackson Merrill, Ichiro, and Ronald Acuña Jr. were all easy highlights for me. Honestly though, just pick your favorite player or team in the checklist and check out their cards. If they have a short print image variation (20 cards) or even a super short print image variation (10 cards), I think you’ll be exceedingly happy with how they look.

*2024 Topps Black & White Jackson Merrill SP*

The format has changed from the past two years into a more traditional hobby box approach. In 2023, you would 30 cards in a box with no guaranteed auto. Your odds of hitting the auto was one in three boxes and your price per box direct from Topps was $50. This year, you get 72 cards per box with one guaranteed auto per box. The price did jump up to $165 per box. However, if you figure that you would have had to buy three boxes to “guarantee” yourself an auto, you would have been into the product at that point for $150. So even though the price point seems like a massive jump, the reality is that it basically ended up being more similar than one would assume at first blush.

The only thing that could make this a better product moving forward besides the obvious making it cheaper (I’m a dreamer) is to move from sticker autos to on card autos.

Final Thoughts

2024 in the baseball card hobby felt like a return to a pre-pandemic sort of world. The rhythm is what we knew - strong market in the spring as the baseball season ramps up and then it becomes more about performance than anything else through the season, and then the market in general just dips or meanders into and through the off-season.

The product suite has stabilized with fewer new products, and the house cleaning in 2023, shocking as it was, has not really happened outside of a few exceptions in 2024. Very few prospects are getting that irrational exuberance treatment. About the only thing that I can point to that hasn’t headed back towards the pre-pandemic paradigm are sealed product prices from Topps at release. That’s not really surprising for a number of reasons, especially because box and case prices tend to be a lagging indicator rather than a leading indicator. When Topps can force allocations onto their direct partners for the unpopular products, there’s no reason from Topps perspective not to keep the prices high.

More than any year since I started writing this article, I felt a surprising lack of compelling stories to write about. Whether that’s a good or bad thing probably depends on your perspective. I sort of like the return to a more rational hobby, at least in comparison to everything that has happened since the pandemic. On the other hand, I would like a bit more spice, a bit more of the unexpected, to keep us talking and keep the baseball card hobby on the tip of the tongue, as they say.

Let’s see what 2025 has to offer beyond just new prospects and new rookies and a sprinkling of new products in baseball cards. Hopefully we get some product price reductions (although I’m not holding my breath), new product innovations, and some unexpected curveballs that have positive spin, rather than negative spin.

Card Market data provided via CardLadder.com

Grading Card data provided via Gemrate.com