Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects Primer

Chris Harris from Stale Gum just got a box, there are 8 brazillion cards from the product on eBay, and Wax Heaven is already working on the 2008 edition. Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects went live this week and as usual the Chrome rush is on. The main difference between regular Bowman and Draft picks is that there are no veterans in the Draft Picks set. So if you're like me and don't care to open a pack of Bowman and see a bunch of red cards, then Draft Picks and Prospects is for you. There are only two types of cards in this product: Black bordered cards with a green frame around the player that feature cards with an official MLB rookie logo, and white bordered cards with a blue frame of all the draft picks and minor leaguers that the MLB license says can't be on baseball cards but Topps does it anyway.

So for review, The Bowman color scheme:

Red - MLB veterans, worthless crap. Not found in Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects.

Green - Official MLB Rookie logo. The player probably has a card in a Bowman set from five years ago.

Blue - The actual rookies that people are soiling their shorts over. Make sure the card says "1st Bowman Card" now that Topps has a few of these insert sets under their belt.

A Draft Picks pack is slightly different from a regular Bowman pack as well. There are still two Chrome, two blue "1st cards" and one thick gold parallel or relic, but instead of five base cards there is only two. Put down the pitchforks.... no need to riot over Topps ripping you off of three whole cards. Remember, the base cards are all MLB rookies in this set. You get three less cards, but those cards in Bowman were probably David Eckstein, Scott Podsednik and Raul Ibanez anyway. To illustrate what you can expect from a normal pack, here's what I got from my first pack of Draft Picks and Prospects:

1st two cards: green black border MLB rookies

The instant gratification portion of the pack. If you follow baseball at all, you've probably heard of somebody in the green set. Joba is in here.

cards 3 and 4: the stuff people actually care about


Since they are twice as hard to get as the base cards and you have to fight off the Chromies and Prospectors to get one of them, these end up being the expensive cards. Plus, here be refractors...

card 5: big fat gold card

There is a slight chance you get a relic card here, but you won't care. All you want is a superfractor auto. When have you ever seen a Bowman relic card sell for four figures on eBay? Also notice that this is a blue card but it doesn't say "1st Bowman card" on it. This is because there is a subset of prospect cards that were important enough to get in a previous Bowman set, were important enough to warrant a place on this set's checklist, but were not important enough to actually get called up to the majors last September.

we now interrupt the regularly scheduled pack bust to bring you a checklist

last two cards: the white border minor leaguers

You have no idea who these people are, but when you are looking through your collection for a card of a hot rookie in 2010, you'll probably be looking through these white cards.

Ok, now for the inserts. Base cards have a blue parallel serial numbered to something or other and a red border numbered 1/1. Chrome has the typical rainbow of refractors including plain ol' refractor, X-fractor, blue refractor, gold refractor, orange refractor, red refractor and the King Kamehameha Superfractor. There's an autographed version of all these as well. The inserts round out with a Head of the Class dual auto (also in plain, gold and superfractor version), printing plates (also with auto version) and the aforementioned meaningless relics.

This is the very last release I really care about this year, and you'll be the first to know if/when I bust a box. I'm crossing my fingers that a Tim Lincecum "upside down photo" error or a Phil Hughes "penis in plain view" variation doesn't pop up and cause the boxes to go through the roof before I can pick one up. It's Christmas, man, I got presents to buy before I can get me a box...