Everybody has different strategies for which area they like to attack when it comes to buying Bowman prospects. Personally I’ve always been a fan of the mega sleepers because those are the players who inspired me to create the Bowman Prospect Rankings. We all know Jesus Made is #1 but who has all of the ingredients for hobby success that’s not currently in MLB Pipeline’s top 100 prosects? That’s what I always wanted to know. Part of the reason that most people don’t dive that deep is because for the most part these aren’t going to be guys who ever make it to top 10 prospect status and the thought of buying a $5 autograph to watch it go to $20 isn’t on their radar. But what about color? Color multiplies along with the base autographs, so after paying taxes and fees that $5 to $20 increase might be nothing but if you bought a True Orange /25 auto for $100 and all of the sudden it’s a $400 card that would be worth your time. To be honest this is in my opinion the most fun area to buy in. While everyone fights over Leo De Vries autographs go find a prospect that nobody cares about and buy a Red /5 and hope he pops. Even if he does a little bit you’ll see those cards multiply in ways that the base autographs of the guys already at the top could never.

On the other hand depending on how deep into the sleeper range you go you run the risk of buying players who might fade into nothing where players like Jesus Made and Leo De Vries will never be nothing, not anytime soon at least. And while buying the top guys sounds like it’s too obvious Dahl from ProspectPulse and I once dove into price changes from January 1st to March 1st each year for the previous #1 overall prospects. Every season without fail Jackson Holliday, Roman Anthony, Konnor Griffin, etc. went up $100+ on their base autograph alone just from being in a position where they’re going to get pumped to the moon during Spring Training by MLB, by ESPN, everywhere you look online that’s whose video clips you’ll see. Let’s say hypothetically you buy a Jesus Made 1st base autograph today for $300 and hold it until 2027 Spring Training. It gets to $450 (not unreasonable), you sell it on eBay and out the door you net $390. Now that might only show as a 30% gain but profiting almost $100 on a base autograph is pretty damn good.

Now that I’ve built buy ratings and target prices into the Bowman Prospect Rankings it spits out a score for each hitter in my top 250 based on how good of a buy it determines them to be. Those buy ratings are determined by the gap between a player’s actual base autograph price and their target price, but it is calculated as a percentage. That makes it not uncommon for the big name players at the top of the rankings to wind up in a “hold” range because even if they have a $100 auto that the rankings think should be $140 that 40% discrepancy isn’t enough to trigger a “buy”. If any prospects are going to get into that $200+ range it’s going to be those top ones though for the most part so while it seems counterintuitive to buy the obvious names it actually works for a lot of people. For that reason I’ve split the ‘best prospects to buy’ into two schools of thought if you will. One is just straight up the biggest dollar amount gap between their actual price and target price which you’ll see is overwhelmingly big names because as I mentioned those are the ones that have the highest cap. The second format however is presented in the original spirt of the Hobby Rankings and that’s by the percentage difference. There might be less potential buying the base autographs of these prospects but since they’re so undervalued their color parallels have a better chance to increase exponentially.

Players highlighted in red have qualified for both lists