Collect call: 2009 Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects baseball

Posted Jan 4, 2010 by Bob D'Angelo

Updated Jan 4, 2010 at 09:25 PM

The Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects baseball set has been a kind of a hit-or-miss product through the years. On the one hand, collectors can find gems like Gordon Beckam. On the other hand are guys who may never sit in a major-league dugout during the regular season.

That’s what is fun about this set. The 2009 Bowman DP&P offers its usual hodgepodge of cards (rookie, prospects and World Baseball Classic cards, and two chrome cards per pack), making it tough for set builders to come close to completing it.

Beckham is featured on the front of the hobby box, but he is not included in the set. Seems like a strange choice, but what other decision could the executives at Topps have made? You can’t have a no-name out there, right?

I have some ideas.

There are some wonderful player names in this set. Roll these names off your tongue: Seth Schwindenhammer. Sequoyah Stonecipher. Marc Rzepczynski. I would have opted to put Schwindenhammer on the box cover, but that’s only because I enjoy strange decisions.

Here’s the basics. A hobby box contains 24 packs, with seven cards to a pack. There are 55 base rookies, 75 prospects and 35 World Baseball Classic cards. There are probably too many WBC cards in this set, but the real criticism is that the WBC and prospect cards look almost identical. The only difference is the WBC logo in the lower right-hand corner of the card.

The hobby box I recently sampled contained 46 base cards, 21 prospects and 27 WBC cards. And, there was plenty of chrome — 16 rookies and 30 WBC cards.

The box also yielded an X-fractor card of Italy’s Luca Panerati, numbered to 199.

Bowman promises one autograph per box, guaranteed. The one in this particular hobby box was signed by Angels prospect Mike Trout and numbered to 150.

The design is clean and crisp, as it has been for several years. And with its usual assortment of parallel cards (16 gold prospects and eight gold rookie cards, plus two light blue parallels), Bowman DP&P certainly offers an assortment. It’s maddening for a set builder, but a treat for those collectors seeking variety.