Chrome season always sneaks up on me. One week we're grinding through the summer release lull, and the next there's a fresh Bowman Chrome checklist sitting in my inbox and half of our internal company chat is arguing about teenage shortstops from Santo Domingo.
This one feels different, though. It's the 30th year of Bowman Chrome, and Topps clearly knew it — the product splits a 100-card base set of established stars and rookies against a separate 100-card Chrome Prospects checklist, and that prospects side is absolutely loaded.
Start with the obvious one: Luis Hernández. The Giants gave him $4,997,500 — the top bonus in the entire international class — and he responded by skipping the DSL altogether, hitting nearly .300 with power in the complex, and forcing his way to Single-A San Jose at 17. He won't turn 18 until December. His 1st Bowman Chrome auto is the card in this product.
Right behind him is Wandy Asigen, the Mets' $3.9M shortstop who's playing the whole DSL season at 16 and drawing Jazz Chisholm comps, and Franklin Arias, who Boston has developed from a glove-first prospect into the #3 prospect in all of baseball. If you're ripping for one of those three and pull any of the others, you're not exactly crying about it.
The fun of this checklist is how deep the second tier runs. Kansas City's Angeibel Gomez might be the best prospect Venezuela produced this cycle — he's hitting .357 in the DSL out of the same city that gave us Cabrera and Altuve. Detroit's Randy Santana has a legit cannon of an arm and came out of the academy that produced Soto and Elly. And Oakland's Johenssy Colome is getting Junior Caminero comps with $4M behind him. None of those guys are priced like the headliners yet. That's kind of the point.
Rookie side isn't a throwaway either. Kevin McGonigle is the AL Rookie of the Year favorite, JJ Wetherholt is playing Gold Glove-caliber defense in St. Louis, and Munetaka Murakami — one of the best storylines in baseball this year — anchors what might be the funniest chase in the product: the GPK inserts. Ugly, ridiculous, impossible to find, and everyone wants one.
Add in the Crystallized, PackFractor variations, WBC Flag parallels, and the usual refractor rainbow, and there's a lot of ways to hit here.