If you like finding autographs in your baseball card packs and you’re willing to be patient, you won’t find more bang for your buck than with 2013 Bowman Sterling Baseball, which is scheduled to arrive in hobby shops today. Three of the four cards in each pack will be signed. With six packs per box, that’s 18 autographs per box. At 
around $300 per box, it’s for the pack gambler, but one would think that somewhere in those 18 signatures will be at least one long-term keeper. Not everyone loves Sterling, but if you don’t mind buy and hold, it’s an interesting product.
Bowman Sterling returns to the vertical design after a brush with horizontal mode in 2012. Expected to be the final baseball card product of the year from Topps, it will again focus on prospects and rookies with one non-autograph rookie or prospect joining the three signed cards. Topps promises the majority of those autographs will be signed directly on the cards rather than on stickers.
Among the fresh concepts are Sterling Autograph Showcase cards, numbered to 25. A 1/1 parallel Sterling Silver version is included in the mix. Sterling Blue Sapphire Signings are numbered to 50, with a Ruby parallel version numbered to 25 and 1/1 Superfractors.
The ongoing signed Bowman Black cards return in 2013 Sterling with cards numbered 125-150. They’ll be numbered to 25.
Nickname Autographs will be numbered to 15 with players adding a nickname to their signature.
Box Loaders, numbered to 20, will also have 1/1 Superfractors.
The “Best Bowman Players of All-Time” program concludes, as the best players ever depicted in Bowman are featured on Blue Sapphire Refractor reprints of their first Bowman cards.
Base cards will be numbered no higher than 199 with a slew of refractor parallels at lower levels.
The standard autograph breakdown looks like this:
Autographed Prospects
Refractor numbered to 150
Green Refractor numbered to 125
Ruby Refractor numbered to 99
Orange Refractor numbered to 75
Gold Refractor numbered to 50
Blue Refractor numbered to 25
Purple Refractor numbered to 10
Canary Diamond numbered to 3
Red Refractor numbered 1/1
Superfractor numbered 1/1
Printing Plates numbered 1/1
Autographed Rookie Cards
Refractor numbered to 150
Green Refractor numbered to 125
Ruby Refractor numbered to 99
Orange Refractor numbered to 75
Gold Refractor numbered to 50
Blue Refractor numbered to 25
Purple Refractor numbered to 10
Canary Diamond numbered to 3
Red Refractor numbered 1/1
Superfractor numbered 1/1
Printing Plates numbered 1/1
Dual Autographs
Dual Refractor numbered to 35
Blue Refractor numbered to 15
Purple Refractor numbered to 5
Canary Diamond numbered to 3
Red Refractor numbered 1/1
Superfractor numbered 1/1
Printing Plates numbered 1/1
Sterling arrives just in time for gift giving and hobby shops are no doubt happy to have an autograph-heavy product to offer over the next week. Boxes are being sold online for around $250-275. Click here to see what’s available now.
Here’s a checklist (updated December 19) 2013 Bowman Sterling Baseball Checklist
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