Bowman Spotlights: The Callup Board, September Edition

The number six prospect in baseball got the call, his card had already tripled before anyone heard the news, and the board finally has a column for the thing it has been arguing about all season.

Josue De Paula debuted for the Dodgers on September 11. He is the highest-ranked name this board has tracked into a callup all year, and he arrived having already done the thing these updates keep telling you to do: his 1st Bowman auto went from a $125 median in March to $197 in the two weeks before the call, then printed three separate $275 sales on debut day itself. He went 0-for in that game. Nothing he did on the field moved the price; the callup did, on a card that had been climbing for six months before the news arrived.

Two changes this month. First, there is now a Debut day column, because the single most important number on this board has never actually been in it. When I wrote that Báez sold at $500 on debut night and was back near $100 two weeks later, that $500 lived in a paragraph and nowhere else. It is a column now, for every name. Second, every figure is computed the same way from the same source — previous boards compared "Debut $" against "Aug 6" against "Now," and the columns drifted apart.

The short version is unchanged: the debut is the exit. But the new column lets me put a number on how often that is true, and it is more often than even I was claiming.

The columns, defined once

Every figure is the median of actual sold raw base autos in a window, from sold comps rather than a running average:

• March — all sales March 1–31, the pre-hype baseline
• At callup — the 14 days before the debut, the price going in
• Debut day — the debut and the three days after, with the peak print noted where the spike ran well past the median
• 2–4 wks post — days 14 to 28 after the debut, once the window has closed
• Now — the current badge

Vs callup measures Now against At callup. A † means fewer than four sales backed that cell — real, but thin.

One clarification that matters, because it is the distinction the whole playbook rests on: At callup is the pre-debut price, not the debut-day price. Báez was a $107 card going in and a $500 card for one night. Both are true. Conflating them is how a board ends up telling the wrong story.

The board

The number the new column produces

Of the 47 names with debut-day sales on record, 29 printed a peak at least 50 percent above their at-callup price. Not a handful. Not just the famous ones. Nearly two in three.

The biggest multiples:

The windows are getting thinner

The peaks have held, but the traffic inside them has not. Median sales recorded in a debut window, by debut month:

Split in half, the peak multiple barely moves — 1.56× for March–June debuts against 1.53× for July–September. The spike is the same size. What has changed is how many chances you get: a March debut saw around 15 sales inside its window, a July debut four.

One caveat I want to be straight about: September's figure of 2 is partly capture lag, since De Paula debuted yesterday and his window is a day old. July is the number to trust — that window closed long ago and still ran a quarter of March's volume.

So "sell into the debut" is getting harder to execute, not less true. The premium is still on offer. There are simply fewer buyers to sell it to, which means being listed before the news rather than reacting to it matters more now than it did in April.

Why Montgomery, not Báez, is the exhibit

Montgomery is the one I would point at if Báez feels like a freak result. Thirty-three sales in his debut window, a peak four times his callup price, and he sits at $35 today — below where he started. The window was not a rumour on his card. It was thirty-three chances to sell.

Joshua Báez, one month on

Three home runs in his first three at-bats. Nobody had ever done it. His card did a full round trip anyway.

Báez homered on the first big league pitch he saw, a 449 foot shot to dead center at Wrigley. Then he homered in his second at-bat. Then he came up in the sixth and became the first player in MLB history to homer in his first three career at-bats. Three for four, five RBIs, 30 family members in the stands. You cannot script a better debut.

A month later the shape is exactly what it was: $107 going in, $500 at the peak, $99 two weeks later, $105 today. The greatest single debut performance in the sport's history bought his card roughly five times its price for about a day, and then the market went right back to where it started. Thirty sales printed inside that window — this was not one lucky listing. It remains the cleanest exhibit the season has produced, and nothing in the last month has softened it.

Walker Jenkins, the other failure mode

A top-15 debut the market fully ignored — and it has since gone the wrong way.

Last month I wrote that Jenkins was dead flat: $161 into the callup, $161 through the debut, $161 now, and that a flat debut for a top-15 prospect was genuinely strange. Two weeks on, that is no longer the story. He is $136, down 15 percent from his callup and down 23 percent from March.

So the flat debut was not a market holding firm. It was the front half of a fade that skipped the spike entirely. Jenkins is the worst outcome on this board — no window to sell into, and the decline arrived anyway. I still own him, the snack pack parallels are still core PC, and he is still a forever collect for me. But anyone who waited for a pop that never came is now 15 percent worse off for having waited.

Kade Anderson

The top pitching prospect in baseball has now completed his window, and it ran the standard course: $113 in March, bid up to $204 into the callup, a modest $275 peak on debut day, and back to $154 within three weeks. He has been flat since.

That is the pitcher pattern this board keeps recording — Schultz, Jump, Snelling, Ritchie and Waldschmidt are all down 51 to 87 percent from their callups. Anderson's version is gentler because of who he is, but the direction never varied. My pitcher rule stands: small swings on arms under $50, and $155 is not a small swing.

Clark and Lombard, the exceptions that held

Two months ago I said the graded market had already decided Clark and Lombard were different from the rest of the board. They still are, and they remain the only two names from the original board meaningfully above their callup price with completed windows.

Lombard went in at $200, peaked at $405 on debut day, and then did the thing almost nothing else here does — he kept going, to $305 at his post-debut mark and $252 today, up 26 percent on his callup. Clark peaked at $499.99 during his window and sits at $240, holding most of a spike a month later.

No position in either, same as last month. Two exceptions out of fifty-six is the honest rate.

Josue De Paula

The best pre-callup run this board has recorded, and the window is open right now.

De Paula is the inverse of every cautionary tale above. Griffin, Bazzana, Snelling and Jacob Gonzalez all arrived at their callups near their highs and gave back 46 to 87 percent. De Paula arrived 58 percent above his March median, and the callup has added 16 more on top.

His pre-debut tape was steadier than the callup noise suggests: $191.50 on 8/30, $202.55 on 9/06, a lone $143.38 on 9/09, and $299 on 9/10 as word got out. Four sales, median $197 — and across the wider August 1 to September 10 stretch, 22 sales at a $201 median. That $143 was one print, not a price level.

Debut day printed $275, $275, $275, $205 and $175. Worth noting the shape: three of five landed on exactly $275, so his debut-day median and peak are the same number. That reads like sellers anchoring to a round figure rather than a bidding war finding a top — which is its own small signal about how thin these windows have become.

What happens next I genuinely do not know. The base case says this is the exit and he is in the $150s by mid-October. The counter-case is that he is a 21-year-old bat ranked sixth in the sport on a Dodgers team playing October baseball — and the two names that beat this board all year, Clark and Lombard, were exactly that profile.

I own De Paula. I am trimming into the window, because I said I do not make exceptions and I meant it. This is the first time all season that has felt like a genuine coin flip rather than a formality.

Ethan Salas, as advertised

Last month I wrote that Salas was on his way up and would be on the next board with a debut price next to his name. He debuted September 2.

$65 in March, $114 into the call, $158 on debut day, $159 now — up 40 percent on the callup and 144 percent from March. He is still inside his window, so his post-debut cell is empty for another week. A 20-year-old catcher who spent the offseason around $30 now sits sixth on this board by raw value. The bump came exactly as predicted. Whether it holds is next month's question, and the board's answer is usually no.

Emmanuel Rodriguez, the late add

Rodriguez debuted September 12 and homered in his first game, going 1-for-4. His card didn't see it coming: $70 in March, $40 into the call, $50 on debut day, and that callup price rests on just two sales. The debut-day bump so far is modest and thin. A first-game home run is the kind of thing that moves a card. This board has watched that reason fail before.

What the standardized columns actually show

Lining every name up the same way revises a claim I have made in every previous edition, and I would rather correct it than keep repeating it.

Across the 52 names with a usable at-callup price, the median card is down 9.6 percent — not the wholesale collapse the wall of down-arrows suggests. The severe fades are real, but they are concentrated, and the concentration is about price:

The expensive debuts fade; the cheap ones rise. Nobody pays a hype tax on a $5 card, so there is no premium to bleed off — Bateman went $5 to $55, Rodden $8 to $13, McFarlane $15 to $26. The $100+ tier is 12 down against 3 up.

The worst of it, measured against the callup: Snelling (-87%), Jacob Gonzalez (-75%), Winston Santos (-69%), Schultz (-68%), Bazzana (-64%), Blaze Jordan (-64%), McDougal (-64%), Waldschmidt (-63%), Ritchie (-61%), Bolte (-55%), Jump (-51%).

So the rule needs stating more precisely than I have been putting it. It is not "sell every debut." It is sell the expensive debuts, because the premium carried into the window is the thing that bleeds. On a $10 card there is nothing to give back.

What I'm doing

Same as every month: selling into windows. The Debut day column is the argument now — 29 of 47 names printed a peak at least half again above their callup, and the overwhelming majority gave it back. You did not need to call the top. You needed to be listed during the window.

De Paula is the live test, and I am following my own rule on the one name where I would most like an exception.

Next update when the September class clears its post-debut windows, with De Paula's 2–4 week cell filled in. That single number is the one I will be watching hardest all month.

Track every name on the HobbyMonitor Prospect Dashboard.

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This is not financial advice. These are cards. The data and analysis are here to inform. You make your own calls.

This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed before publishing. Always verify latest market data, stats, or news.

Updated: September 12, 2026