2018 Bowman

I managed to track down some of the latest hot product, 2018 Bowman Baseball. I was obviously chasing some of the latest hotness in Shohei Ohtani and Ronald Acuna, but I decided to take pictures of a bunch of cards. I got some blasters and some value packs, with the value packs containing exclusive Camo parallels.

One of the fun and maybe confusing things about Bowman is that the base product is really three products. There is a checklist for established players, another checklist for prospects, and a Chrome parallel of the prospect checklist. You get some mixture of these three card types in each pack, along with any inserts or parallels you might come across. I chose eight of the base cards to show off here, including my only Ohtani pull, some Astros, a couple of other famous guys, Ozzie Albies, and Zack Granite.

Here are some of the prospect base cards I pulled, including a couple guys I've actually heard of, like Ronald Acuna, Scott Kingery, and Vladimir Guerroro Jr.

Here are a few of the Chrome prospects I got. I've heard of about half these guys, as I am not much of a prospector. Most of the Bowman guys I know about are players who have already been promoted to an MLB roster, are going to be promoted very soon, or have been touted on Zippy Zappy's blog.

Matt Sauer is one of the guys who I recall seeing on Zippy Zappy's recent Bowman rundown post. These are some of the Camo parallels I got from the value packs.

There were three numbered parallels among my breaks. The Gold Shimmer Refractor of Jose Trevino is numbered # 08 / 50, the Purple Refractor of Ibandel Isabel is numbered # 198 / 250, and the Sky Blue parallel of Miguel Cabrera is numbered # 237 / 499. The seeding on these cards really kind of drives home for me how much Bowman must be printed. I realize that seeding on Hobby packs is probably much easier, but still, let's take that Miguel Cabrera card as an example. Sky Blue parallels are numbered # / 499. There are 100 cards in the base set, so there should be a total of 49,900 of them printed. They are seeded 1:95 packs, and 95 x 49,900 = 4,740,500 packs out there in the world. Again, the Hobby odds should be easier, but that's still an awful lot of baseball cards.

Even though I didn't hit anything super exciting from these packs, I did enjoy the break. Having three different types of base card gives some variety to each pack, and it seemed like there were also plenty of inserts among my packs. One of my favorite inserts is the recurring Bowman Scouts' Top 100, which is a list of a hundred top prospects in baseball, arranged in order. You can see that the meter in the bottom left corner is red for top prospects, yellow for medium prospects, and green for the lower portion of the list. Every year I think about building this insert set, but so far I haven't gotten around to it in any season.

The #BowmanTrending insert is the obligatory nod to social media, since young prospects are probably all about the Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Players who have a social media presence get their handles added to the nameplates on their cards, while players without public profiles get the generic @bowmancards. 

I am not sure what to think about these Bowman Birthdays inserts. Maybe there is a sell sheet out there that explains them, but it appears to be an insert set dedicated to players born in 1993. This is a decent collection of talent, but I just don't know the meaning behind it.

The Talent Pipeline insert shows players from each team's A, AA, and AAA affiliates. It's a decent insert idea for a prospect-based product.

Finally, there is a 2018 ROY Favorites insert, showcasing players who have a shot at the 2018 Rookie of the Year award. I can almost guarantee that none of the guys I pulled will win a Rookie of the Year award in 2018. Word on the street is that MLB will allow the Angels to play half a season in the weakest NL division so that Shohei Ohtani can win the AL and NL Rookie of the Year awards.

And that's the rundown of my 2018 Bowman breaks. It was pretty fun to bust open a bunch of packs of this stuff, and I may pick more of it up if I can find it.