Once again, card collectors found themselves in a quandary during a product's release week with the arrival of 2026 Bowman Baseball. On one hand, new products are fun, and they are especially fun when you have new prospect Bowman 1sts to chase after. However, with release weeks come release week prices, which are the stuff nightmares are made of.
It happens like clockwork every single release. Collectors are anxious and impatient, and as packs get ripped of a new product, the market is flooded with cool cards at completely unreasonable prices. Many of those prices end up coming down eventually without being sold, but a select few actually work and emerge as entrants into the release day/week buyers' Hall of Shame.
Here are some of the worst sales from 2026 Bowman's release week and why
Now, if you are one of these poor souls who made these purchases and you have Scrooge McDuck-levels of money that you are swimming around in, you do you. However, that doesn't mean these purchases are any better and, if anything, it creates needless (if temporary) chaos in the card marketplace. A bad buy is a bad buy, and there has been no shortage of qualified candidates from Bowman release week.
Munetaka Murakami Gold Refractor rookie auto - $10,000
This is tough for a rational mind to comprehend, but rationality has nothing to do with all of the hype around Munetaka Murakami cards right now. Don't get us wrong, he is incredibly fun and plays on a White Sox team that finally looks like they are trending upward again. However, we are talking about a guy with no defensive value who is third in fWAR on his own team, let alone when compared to the rest of the league.
Yes, Murakami hits bombs and also has a strong fanbase over in Japan, but those collectors would be well-served to wait for prices to come down as he gets more rookie cards, because sales like this one are nuts.
Now, it was inevitable that the highly sought-after Anime inserts were going to feature prominently on this installment of the Hall of Shame. However, this is a unique intersection of Anime SSP hype and the wild west that is Shohei Ohtani's card market. However, even by that standard, this sale (and the others like it) is pretty excessive.
We know that the usual rules don't apply to buying/selling Ohtani cards at this point as he is a unicorn in the collecting world. However, over eight grand for an Ohtani card that isn't signed and has close to 200 printed copies feels like an extremely poor investment.
Okay, this is a bit of a weird one, because Hartman was one of the prospects that we identified as one that collectors SHOULD be targeting in 2026 Bowman. However, context is important. Hartman, for the moment, is a relatively unknown commodity to casual fans and has basically had two really good months in the minors. If you are certain that Hartman is going to be a top 20 prospect or something, $100-120 for a base auto is defensible, if a bit rich. The fact this one sold for $200 on release day is complete insanity.
It also was extremely predictable that that price was always going to look terrible in short order. As of May 19, you can get a Hartman base 1st auto for around $120-130 and that number is probably going to continue to go down a bit. We love Hartman as a long-term hold, but only if you can get in at a reasonable price point, especially when it comes to base autos. They print a lot of those, everyone. Remember that.
Kevin McGonigle Packfractor - $425
Okay, this is an impulse purchase that we can at least understand. The Packfractors in 2026 Bowman are very cool and scratch the nostalgia itch for those that have been collecting a while. If someone wants to shell out triple-digits for a prominent 1st or, even better, an autographed version, that is forgivable.
But seriously, what are we doing here with this sale? This is neither a McGonigle rookie (those have yet to come out in a standard release) or a McGonigle 1st. This is just a McGonigle prospect parallel (albeit a cool looking one) numbered to 89. There are currently listings for higher than this sale (which is also nuts), but odds feel pretty good that you could land this same card for at least half of what this one sold for before too long.
Ethan Holliday 1st Auto Purple Parallel - $1,100
Alright, the color-match fiends have gone too far now. Ethan Holliday is one of the biggest chases in the whole product, but this is rather excessive. The general rule of thumb has been that purple autos go for 2x to 3x the price of a base auto under typical circumstances which SHOULD put the top end of this card, during release week, at around $750.
So why did this sell for so much more? Well, because it is purple and that is one of the Rockies' colors. That's it. There is no other explanation and that is deeply silly. You need proof this was way outside the realm of sanity? How about the fact that multiple Blue parallel autos of Hollidays (another very desirable parallel color) have been routinely selling for $300-400 less than this despite the fact that they are significantly more short-printed at 150 copies than the purples with 250.
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