In May Bowman Mega Boxes were apparently all the rage. I noticed a post on Reddit the other day about how someone “got in” on the Mega Box craze before the price sky-rocketed. I was confused. I had bought two of them with zero fuss.

I checked eBay and sure enough, people are asking $75-100 for these $15 boxes.

I didn’t really get it. What’s was the big deal? I literally opened two of them and there were plenty more at my Target at the time. Then I read about Shohei Otani.

People are apparently hoarding these boxes, looking for the first Bowman cards of the “Japanese Babe Ruth” and asking for crazy money for them. There’s also “Aaron Judge Mania”, which took these boxes from an absurd $100, to north of $200 the last time I checked. These are BLASTERS people.

Like I said, I had two of them, I could have made serious bank. What did I do? I opened them of course, and here are the results…

Right up front, I should be honest, I didn’t get any Otahni cards. I didn’t get any Judge cards either. Otahni was in a sub-set of WBC cards, which were hard to pull in general (although I did get one) and Judge was only in an insert set called ROY Favorites, which is ironic because the cards were produced months ago.

Also, it should be noted that I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to prospect cards. I don’t have guys in Single-A or Double-A on my radar, I don’t really pay attention to the draft, and I really only get interested in the next wave of players when my team needs to fill a spot, or because the media attention is too hard to ignore.

Most of my really valuable rookie cards were complete flukes. So, please, if any of these names stand out as valuable, please let me know, because I have no idea. If I scanned it, it was because I had heard of the player, or it was shiny. I probably missed a few good ones.

Might as well do these alphabetically since that’s how they’re sitting in my scan folder. We’ll do these in chunks and then get into the details in between. Since damn near everything in the box was “special” somehow, there’s a lot to scan.

That’s not a bad group to start off with. You guys liking the image grid? I’m liking the image grid.

The purple and green refractors are actually semi rare. These boxes (and the mojo parallels) are rare to begin with, but with only 5 packs per box and the purples being 1:6, you’re not even supposed to get one. The green are 1:15. So, statistically, with only 10 packs total, I could have pulled one purple, and zero green. As you can see as we go, I did considerably better than that. One box had an entire pack of purple (hot pack?). I ended up with 4 purple, a green and an auto.

As for these, the Benintendi RC was the ONLY card I went into this hoping to pull. Getting a Tyler Austin, Alex Bregman and Gavin Cecchini were icing on the cake. I had vaguely heard of Tyler Beede as well, so I’m assuming that’s a good thing.

Here’s our second group. The Dahl rookies are nice, he had started off red-hot last year but I think he’s come back down to earth. The Mauricio Dubon is probably the best of the group, he’s one of the better prospects in the Brewers system. Chapman cracked the top 100 prospects list. An RC for Fulmer isn’t too bad either.

Pretty solid third group here, as several of these guys are in the most recent “Top 100 prospects” lists. Mitch Keller is #22, Kevin Maitan is #44, Francisco Meija is #16 and Moncada is still ranked as #1.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting an auto. I really wasn’t expecting a Red Sox auto. I most certainly wasn’t expecting a Mojo Refractor auto. That pretty much destroyed the pack odds in these boxes. Not to mention a mojo version of Victor Robles (#5 top prospects) and the Gleybar Torres (#3). Rutherford is another in the top 100 (#45), and the purple mojo is my 3rd from the boxes.

There were also 3 “Talent Pipeline” cards in my boxes. I don’t think the Pipeline insert set was in regular Bowman, so these might have been exclusive to these boxes (someone correct me if I’m wrong). I got all 3 in the parallel mojo packs. The purple refractor also had different odds than the regular purple. It was apparently a 1:18.