There was a time when I would anticipate the release of Bowman as the true beginning of MY card collecting year. At the time I didn’t value Topps flagship the way many other do. I was all about the rookie cards and what better place than to start the card year than with the self-proclaimed “Home of the Rookie Card.”

But times and collecting habits have changed. And really our hobby has changed as well as finding Bowman on retail shelves “in the wild” has become akin to a Hot Wheel collector seeking the elusive Treasure Hunts.

I shop at Target a lot. Not just for cards, but for pretty much everything I need. So every time I go in I take a look at what’s new. And while I no longer hunter Bowman the way I had say in 2010, I am still keeping an eye out for a blaster or two just to try my luck.

Well, the stuff is gone. Period. I’ve not seen a single blaster, and up until yesterday I had not even seen a “Value pack,” one of the 19-card types for $5.99. All I had seen to that point was an occasional loose pack from a gravity feeder.

Feeling as if I had found some sort of gold by simply locating two Value Packs, I decided to buy them, as well as a single loose pack. I’ll tell you, that $3.99 price tag on Bowman retail is mighty ugly.

If there is one thing I have learned from Bowman in recent years its that unless your card has ink on it or is shiny and bears a low serial number, odds are the secondary market doesn’t care a whole lot. And while as a collector that market shouldn’t matter, it still creeps into MY head when I am shelling out a few bucks — in this case $3.99 for 12 Bowman cards — and it does make think more before pulling the trigger on any said purchase.

Anyway, Bowman is what it is — the lottery ticket of the baseball genre of card collecting. It’s not what it was in the 1990s; it’s really about the Chromes embedded within the backs, and the variations thereof.

I won’t tell you how to collect or spend your money; hell, evenm I get a little wrapped up in this gamble. Which is why I bought the two Value Packs and the loose pack, the results of which I shall share below.

The loose pack had a nice Green Refractor /99 inside of a top prospect Nico Hoerner, who has had Bowman Cards before. It’s a nice hit for 1:141 packs, even cooler since this is a local guy for me. Sadly, this card does bear some scratches on the surface. Ugh.

The first Value Pack sort of picks up where the loose pack left off. Does the name on that Refractor look familiar? Yeah, it’s Nico Hoerner again, this time /499. Surface isn’t bad, but I’d have to balk if someone asked me the age-old Chrome speculator question: “Will it gem?”

The last Value Pack had the biggest name in out hobby right now — aside from Mike Trout — on a good-looking prospect insert. Vlad Guerrero Jr. is THE guy to chase/own/sell and this is a good looking card that would probably net me a whole $1 at auction. I’ll just toss it in the small stack of other Vlad’s I have sitting around.

I definitely beat the odds with the few packs that I found, but unless I find a blaster in the wild, I probably won’t be buying much more of this. (I did buy five Bowman loose packs but haven;t written about them — nothing big in those either — and no Clayton Kershaw cards either.) I have no intention on paying full hobby box prices, or paying $3.99 for a loose pack at this point. This isn’t MY scope of collecting any more.

This entry was posted on April 30, 2019 at 8:19 am and is filed under Box / Pack Break, Misc. with tags Bowman, Bowman Chrome, Nico Hoerner, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.. 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.