Box Review: 2024 Topps Big League (hobby)

Earlier this past week, I ran another group break over on my Discord which happened to feature two boxes of the brand new 2024 Topps Big League.  Today, I thought it'd be a fun idea to review the first of the two boxes we opened.

2024 Topps Big League hobby boxes come with 18 packs with 8 cards per pack. 

Let's get the bad news out of the way first.  This year, Topps broke the 310 card base set up into different rarity tiers.  Cards #1-200 are common, #201-250 are Rainbow Foil uncommons, #251-275 are Blue Foil rares, #276-300 are Red Foil Super Rares, and #301-310 are Gold Foil Legendary cards.  

The base set tiers are something that Upper Deck did a lot of toward the end of their run of baseball cards and I hate it.  As a set collector, having a subset of short prints is bad enough...but having four subsets of short prints with varying degrees of difficulty to pull is awful.  It's even worse when you consider just exactly how rare the various tiers are in this year's Big League set (the figures below are for hobby boxes).

• Commons:  6 per pack
• Rainbow Foil uncommons:  1 per pack
• Blue Foil rares: 1 in 18 packs (or 1 per hobby box)
• Red Foil super rares:  1 in 91 packs (or about 1 in 5 hobby boxes)
• Gold Foil legendary:  1 in 361 packs (or about 1 in 20 hobby boxes i.e. 1 per case)

For a set that is ostensibly geared toward kids, there shouldn't ever be a single base card that you'd need to buy a full case to find...and yet, this year's Big League set has 10 different Gold Foil legendary cards to track down at those odds!  Who in their right mind would buy 10 cases of Big League with hopes of getting perfect collation on those Gold Foil legendary cards which is what it would take to build the full base set.  Ugh, no thanks to that.

It's a real shame that Topps went with the tiered rarity route for the base set because the actual set itself is quite nice!  The set contains a nice mix of batting/pitching/fielding shots along with several more interesting photos scattered throughout the set.  I like the slight color differences of the cards depending on the featured team as well.

  

Our box contained a total of 104 base cards and I'm happy to report that all were unique.  Thus, we pulled just over 50% of the full (common) base set in our box.

I'll also take a moment to show the card backs:

To me, the card backs remind me of regular Topps flagship backs (and I mean that as a compliment).  Lots of statistics (though not necessarily full career stats) along with a nice write-up for each player.  As a kid, I would have read every single card back multiple times!  

Overall, the regular base cards (cards #1-200) could easily have been designed as Topps' main flagship set for 2024 and I think many people would have been satisfied.  As far as design goes, I think Topps knocked it out of the proverbial park with both 2024 Big League and 2024 Topps flagship!  Unfortunately, Topps did have to ruin the collectability of the Big League set by making such difficult-to-pull rare tiers of base cards, but I've already discussed that so there's no reason to relitigate things here.

Moving on to the inserts which were plentiful (as you'd expect in a kid-centered product).  We'll start with my personal favorite set, the To the Moon die-cut set:

Seeded 1:3 packs, we pulled our expected six inserts.  The To the Moon inserts have a nice shine to them which works nicely with the theme.  The player choice, however, is well..."interesting" I guess.  I'm not sure what type of set should have guys like Matt Olson and Austin Riley as well as retired players like Sammy Sosa and guys who haven't made a name for themselves like Junior Caminero.  That all said, I do like the look of the cards a lot and the die-cut featuring makes the inserts actually feel special which is all I can ask for from an insert set.

My next favorite insert set that we pulled was the Mascots set:

Seeded 1:6 packs, once again we were right on the money with our three cards from the set showing up.  I find it kind of odd that the White Sox mascot's name is simply "mascot" according to the card (I did some research online and apparently the mascot is actually named "Southpaw."  I have no idea why Topps didn't include his name on the card, I almost wonder if "mascot" was a placeholder from the graphic design team and no one caught the error before the cards were actually printed.

Next up in order of most-to-least favorite for me are the Big Leaguers inserts:

These are seeded 1:5 packs so you'd expect either 3 or 4 in an 18-pack box of cards.  We ended up the high end of that estimate with our four cards.  The design for these is all over the place.  For my money, the Ichiro and Hank Aaron cards are both kind of vanilla while the Henderson is kind of cool with the chains for a border (I think of Rickey as having lots of chains in his playing days).  However, none of those three cards are worth discussing when compared to that Cal Ripken, Jr. card...perhaps one of the weirdest cards of the Iron Man that I've ever seen!  I have so many questions.  Why does he have a robotic arm?  Why is there a Bowser shell on his shoulder?  Why is the border a race flag?  Why is there orange smog in the background?  Why is this card a cartoon drawing when the other three are all actual photographs?!  Why?!

Finally, we get to the last of the inserts that we pulled from our box, the Good Vibrations set:

Seeded 1:4 packs, you'd expect between 4 and 5 cards in a box and once again we came out on the high end here with our five cards..  While the Good Vibrations set might be my least favorite of the inserts in the box, I must say that I still like this set (it probably helps that we pulled the Elly De La Cruz card here as well).  

That does it for the inserts from our box.  There are several other insert sets in 2024 Big League but they are rarer pulls and we didn't find them.  We did, however, find some of the higher tier base cards so let's look at those next beginning with the Rainbow Foil uncommon cards (cards #201-250 in the base set):

In total, we pulled our expected 18 Rainbow Foil cards (they are seeded 1-per-pack).  I only scanned half of the cards we pulled (but if you want to see them all you can always go back and watch my live group break video here).

Next, our lone Blue Foil rare (seeded 1 per box):

That's a nice box hit for the Orioles team slot in the break!  With 25 blue foils to track down to build a full base set (and with blue foils only being seeded one-per-box), good luck building the full set.  I know, I know, I already complained about the rarity tiers but for a set like Big League which should be about building a base set, I can't get past the stupid decisions by Topps.

Speaking of stupid, how about even rarer "base" cards?  We lucked out and pulled one of the Super Rare Red Foil cards as well:

Seeded 1:91 packs, the 25 card subset of Red Foils basically ruins most people's chances at putting together the set even if they bought a full case of Big League to open.  There's also one more even rarer tier of base cards (Legendary Gold Foils) but we didn't find one of those in our box.  I will say that the Acuna card looks good with the Red Foil and the Braves colors.  Definitely a nice hit for Atlanta!

Finally, we have one more card to show off and it's a surprise autograph from the Opening Act autograph set:

The Opening Act autographs are seeded 1:62 packs so there was no guarantee of getting a signature in our box.  It's a good looking card, though I wish the autograph was on-card rather than a sticker.  Still, no complaints from me on getting a surprise hit for a group break box!

Conclusion:

Overall, I give the 2024 Topps Big League box the following rating:

Set Design:  A-

Collation:  A

Opening Thrill:  A-

Overall:  A-

This was a hard box to grade for a couple of reasons.  First, we definitely beat the odds in a number of places so this one box was actually quite great.  I ended up opening two boxes of 2024 Big League for the group break and the other box was also good (though probably not quite as good as this one).  Second, for as much fun as the box (and set) happened to be, I couldn't get the icky taste out of my mouth of the tiered rarities for the base set.  In my mind, Big League is a set designed to appeal to kids and I can't think of much of a worse thing to do than to make collecting the last 110 cards in a 310 card set nearly impossible to find.  Still, I have to judge the box on its own merits and for that reason I'm giving it an A-.  Definitely a fun one to rip, especially for the relatively low price point.