Prospecting 101 Episode 1: Understanding the 3 Yearly Bowman Releases
Welcome to Prospecting 101! One of the main reasons for creating Let’s Talk Wax was to provide information for new hobbyists entering the baseball card prospecting realm. Learning the ropes of this small niche in the collecting community can be very overwhelming at times. It’s worth noting though, that once you learn the basics, baseball card prospecting can be a very fun and exciting aspect of the hobby.
In this series I’m going to attempt to use the bottom up approach starting with the absolute basics and building upon those principals. That being said, if you are wanting to dive into baseball card prospecting you must first familiarize yourself with Bowman Baseball Cards.
The Bowman brand has become quite diversified over the years with releases like Bowman Platinum, Bowman’s Best, Bowman Sterling, Bowman X, and a laundry list of others. Let’s make things easy and focus on the “Big 3”. The “Big 3” Bowman releases are: Bowman, Bowman Chrome, and Bowman Draft. These are the 3 flagship releases that occur every year and the mainstays in the prospecting community.
The timeline for these releases got a bit out of sync in 2022 but over the years, here’s how the timeline pans out:
Bowman (Spring Release)
Bowman Chrome (Summer Release)
Bowman Draft (Winter Release)
Cards from all 3 of these releases will have an identical design but there are some key differences I want to explain to you.
Bowman is the first release of every yearly cycle. The checklist contains a hodge-podge of prospects and isn’t really tied to a specific group of players (this will make more sense, keep reading).
Bowman Chrome is the second release and focuses almost solely on the International Signees from the previous year. The MLB has an International Signing Period where big league clubs can make offers to players outside of the US (Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Japan, etc) which is referred to as the International Pool. The International Pool is mainly composed of young prospects (16-18) who begin their first professional season in the Dominican Summer League or stateside in the Complex League.
The 3rd and final release of the yearly Bowman cycle is Bowman Draft. This release contains players who were drafted out of both HS and NCAA the previous year. Bowman Draft is usually the fan favorite of the 3, which over the years, has produced some really incredible prospect checklists.
Now let me go back to the 1st release of the year which is Bowman. Now that you understand that Bowman Chrome and Bowman Draft checklists are centered around a specific group of prospects, the Bowman release will make a bit more sense. I mentioned earlier that Bowman was a “hodge-podge” of prospects. This “hodge-podge” is usually made up of the players that were left out of the previous year’s Bowman Chrome and Bowman Draft release (along with some other random prospects along the way). For example, 2022 Bowman had players like Colson Montgomery (MLB Draft) and James Wood (MLB Draft) that weren’t on the 2021 Bowman Draft Checklist and Bryan Acuna (International Pool) who wasn’t on the 2021 Bowman Chrome Checklist.
It’s important to understand the “Big 3” and a very fundamental part to the beginning of your prospecting journey. In our next episode of Prospecting 101 we will discuss the holy grail of prospecting called the “Bowman 1st”.