With the hype surrounding this years release of Bowman baseball, it was impossible to pass on this. I love this product, but in recent years it has waned on me. Too much nonsense, not enough punch. Typically Topps holds back the good stuff for its Chrome and Draft releases. This year, though, basic Bowman carries a ton of hype, probably the most I’ve seen since 1997 when Jose Cruz Jr., Hideki Irabu and Travis Lee were all the rage. Anyway, jumbo boxes are what you want, but you’re going to be charged an arm and a leg for them. They were $165 at my local shop … and they were sold out before they hit the shelves. And so I settled for a regular box at a fraction of the price. Here are the goods:

The box didn’t yield any of the Strasburg autos, which are what are driving prices through the roof, but I did manage to get his base Chrome card, as well as his two insert cards — Bowman Expectations (Tim Lincecum is on the other side) and Topps 100 Prospects. I also managed to get Chrome cards of two of the other hotter players in the set, Donovan Tate and Aroldis Chapman. I was really hoping for ones of Dustin Ackley and Bryce Harper as well, but that didn’t happen.

As you can see, I beat the odds and managed to get two autographs. A basic box of 24 packs is “guaranteed” to have one Chrome auto. The jumbo boxes have three, hence the big price jump. My two autos were OK: Josh Thole “RC” and Prospect Wil Myers, who had a Elite auto a few years ago. The box also yielded two refractors serial numbered to 777 copies; Bo Greenwell and Jeff Antigua. My box also had two base parallels, one blue and one orange, both of which were “rookies:” Charlie Morton (/500) and Eric Young Jr. (/250).

One word of warning: The Chrome cards in these boxes are coming out scratched, especially the refractors. If you collect Chrome, you know this is always a problem. But these are pretty bad.

This entry was posted on May 11, 2010 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Box / Pack Break with tags Aroldis Chapman, baseball, baseball cards, Donovan Tate, Dustin Ackley, Stephen Strasburg, Wil Myers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.