Without fail, Bowman can be one of the most difficult checklists to decipher of the year.  If you’re a casual collector, the names on these checklists can just look like mumbo jumbo.  Heck, even the seasoned prospectors must study up.

The COVID-19 cancelled 2020 baseball season certainly hasn’t helped!  Many of these players might be on collectors’ radar screen if they had had a chance to play last year but many of these prospects haven’t even appeared in a professional game yet.

Some of these players will thrive and crush the competition after training for an entire year in preparation for a new season.  Some of these players will struggle to get into a rhythm after being benched for an entire year.

No one has a crystal ball to predict the future but I’m going to shuffle the 2021 Bowman Baseball checklist around a few different ways to offer you some different perspectives.

As always, we are planning on ripping cases day and night for our group breaks. We will have plenty of Pick Your Team, Random Team, and even Random Player formats for breaks. Click the button below to join the community and get in on the action! Links will be added to this page to purchase boxes from us once this product releases on Wednesday, April 28th.

1st Bowman Autos – Former Draft Picks

The Bowman checklist typically picks up a handful of prospects from the previous year’s MLB Draft that didn’t get featured in Bowman Draft.  Since the 2015 MLB Draft, Bowman has saved the #2 pick for the following year’s Bowman product.  This year deviates slightly as the 2020 #2 pick Heston Kjerstad was featured in 2020 Bowman Draft.  Austin Martin was the projected #2 pick but slid in the draft to the Blue Jays at pick #5.  In addition to previous year draft picks, Bowman also picks up late round picks from previous drafts that have had a larger impact in their organization like Nick Maton (drafted 7th round, 2017) who as already made his major league debut for the Phillies

Here is a list of previous year draft picks featuring their 1st Bowman autos:

1st Bowman Autos – International Signees 

An unprecedented 38 international players have their 1st Bowman autographs on this checklist and half of them are only teenagers!  Most of these players signed in 2018/2019 (often at the age of 16) but many haven’t even had a chance to play professionally with the cancelled 2020 season.  Most of these international prospects are signed because of a single exceptional tool or pure athleticism and have lots of development ahead of them, however if they spent the entire lost 2020 season working hard and bulking up we could see some real talent emerge once they start playing in 2021.

Here is the list of International position players 1st Bowman autos by age:

Here is the list of International pitchers 1st Bowman autos by age:

2nd Bowman Autos

2020 Bowman Draft was one of the greatest Bowman products in recent history, possibly ever, with an unprecedented number of prospects absolutely crushing the autograph resale market.  Bowman responded by offering second autographs of these top prospects in this year’s new release.  Some collectors won’t like this at all.  I have a different opinion.  As high as many of these players’ 1st Bowman autos are selling for, I think a second Bowman auto gives a much wider group of fans access to their autographs at a much more affordable price.

Here is the list of players with their 2nd Bowman auto featured in 2021 Bowman:

Rookie Autos

The 2021 Rookie Class has already gotten people pretty excited about the new season.  Some highly anticipated rookies combined with some surprising performances from the end of the 2020 season has given us a pretty good checklist of 2021 Bowman Rookie autographs.  Historically, rookie autographs in Bowman have been significantly more short printed than prospect autographs so don’t expect these to be easy to hit.  Team pricing in 2021 Bowman should be much more skewed to the prospect potential of each team.

Here is the list of players with 2021 Bowman Rookie Autographs: