Hopes of Spring
Baseball Prospecting For Fun & Profit
Once I decided to start treating cards like a business rather than setting my money on fire, I found the very lucrative subculture of baseball prospecting. I think the first year I took it very seriously was around 2010 after I realized that football cards were no longer going to be a good market (more on that another time).
It really took off for me in 2011 after I was able to get a few cases of 2011 Bowman Draft and Bowman Chrome after winning a promo sponsored by Blowout (I’ll tell that story one day, too). That yielded a ridiculous bounty of prospects that brought a very nice return.
I continued for the next couple of years, but eventually lost interest in the prospect game because it was no longer very lucrative: too much competition, too much product, and everything got too expensive to rip.
As I’ve been reflecting on this business and what I used to like about it, I got sucked back in a bit during Spring Training. At least in terms of tracking how some of the big names in the last few drafts were doing. I didn’t buy anything until Wyatt Langford started to heat up. Then I went a little crazy.
I’ll cover that haul once everything has been secured—still have a few slabs with offers and incoming, but with Opening Day arriving tomorrow I wanted to lay out my strategy with Langford as sort of a futures bet on his performance this season.
A lot of what I’m doing now is not the prospecting playbook, but I think it’s time to reconsider how that game is played for a few reasons. Before that, let’s review how you’d typically play the prospecting game:
Either rip wax or identify a target list to grab raw in the early days of the Bowman Draft release.
No pitchers, no catchers, no second basemen.
No one over 21.
Stick to autos or chrome and paper parallels with history.
Grade the good stuff and sell everything during pre-Spring Training hype, during Spring Training, or hold until call-up.
Do not hold until after call-up.
Those rules still serve you well most of the time if you can get the wax or cards at the right price. And #6 is almost always the right call. Almost.
I saw a special opportunity with Langford after looking into his cards following some press about his performance in Spring Training. His stuff seemed really cheap to me compared to his power talent, which almost always gets the attention of collectors. And even as he continued to be on fire the entire Cactus League schedule, his cards didn’t move much off the initial bump that I bought into.
Langford was highly regarded coming into the 2023 draft and the Rangers took him with the fourth pick out of Florida, where he only established himself his last two seasons. He wasn’t even drafted out of high school like many of the power prospects who decide to go to college. So he definitely had hype, but not the long-term hype of some of the guys in the draft.
It didn’t seem like many expected he had a shot at the Opening Day roster for the defending World Champion Rangers, but he had such a good spring that he was named to the roster where he’ll split DH/LF duties.
Here’s what I see in Langford:
Coming into the league at 22, he’s got enough experience to not view the spring as a fluke but he also established this trajectory recently enough to think there could be more upside.
The Rangers lineup is stacked and he’s going to have a very favorable situation with opposing pitchers.
Power plays well in the hobby and his exit velocity numbers are ridiculous.
He’s getting some love in the press that you don’t normally see from a guy who hasn’t had an official at-bat yet.
There’s always a risk that once a book is out on a guy it will take a while for him to adjust. There hasn’t been a lot of evidence for that during Spring Training, but that typically doesn’t start showing up until the games count. However, his bat talent should provide some highlight worthy power even if he struggles for average early on.
So, there’s enough risk to make this interesting but enough talent that I think the floor is pretty high at least this year.
Given the values of his stuff and, frankly, the $250 value limit for the eBay Vault here’s what I went after and what I avoided:
Sapphire base PSA 10s — these carry a nice premium (3x or so) over the Chrome slabs that should expand over time due to the much more attractive pop count (right now pop is 81 for Sapphire base PSA 10 versus 1,211 for Draft Chrome base).
Very low print run non-auto parallels in PSA 9 & 10 — since his prices haven’t gone too crazy, I was able to get some key parallels in non-auto for good values. For example, I got two Chrome Gold Refractors in PSA 10 for an average of about $2,000 each. I got a Sapphire Black Refractor (/10) in PSA 10 for $3,000. These could be massive cards if Langford blows up. I found low print run parallels in PSA 9 were at very attractive values—I’ll talk more about that in the next section.
The autos are the first cards to pick up when one of these prospects starts to blow up, so I stayed away from those other than a SP Variation Auto slab in PSA 9 that was too good of a price to pass up. It helps to zag when others zig in this game.
Because the true debuts (1st Bowman labeled) cards were so cheap, I did not mess with any inserts or other products that Langford had cards in. These sometimes can be good plays if the debuts are out of reach, but they will never have the ceiling of the debuts so you have to be picky.
About those PSA 9s—this is not something I’d normally do because they can be tougher to move in today’s market, but I saw an interesting opportunity with a few I picked up. It seemed in the haste to sell, guys following the normal playbook were really discounting their PSA 9s beyond market. My favorite pickup like this was a Sapphire Orange (/25) PSA 9 that I got for $800. That should easily be double that today.
You have to be selective, but I think getting PSA 9s is still an interesting move with his cards. Especially when you see ones where either the gem rate is really low (i.e., there just won’t be many 10s) or it’s really high and you’ll get a favorable pegging to the PSA 10 values over time.
So, that’s what I’ve been up to with baseball. As mentioned, I’ll do a full rundown of what I picked up once it’s all arrived. I have a couple offers out of this writing, but don’t plan on picking up more once the season starts.
My timeline on some of the fringe stuff would be in the next couple of months depending on how hot he starts out. The key low print run stuff I will probably hold onto past this season unless he just really does not look like what I thought. Once a prospect loses the hobby love, it’s hard to get it back so I don’t want to hang on too long.