For the second year in a row, Topps will make a “what if?” moment one of the highlights of its ultra-popular Bowman Draft release.
Revealed Wednesday in an ad entitled “It’s Gotta Be Elway,” 2024 Bowman Draft Baseball will deliver baseball cards of Denver Broncos legendary quarterback John Elway — though he’ll be in pinstripes, instead of orange and blue.
Much like 2023 Bowman Draft, which featured Tom Brady’s 1st Bowman cards in a Montreal Expos uniform, 2024 Bowman Draft will show Elway in a Yankees uniform decades after he passed on baseball to play football.
A multi-sport star in high school, Elway’s future with baseball seemed set when he was selected by Kansas City in 1979. Elway opted to play both football and baseball at Stanford instead, and a sophomore season highlighted by a .361 batting average and nine home runs caught the attention of the most powerful man in baseball.
The Yankees used a second-round pick and $140,000 to sign Elway in 1981, and it took one batting practice in spring training to convince owner George Steinbrenner that Elway was the next great Bronx Bomber.
“Right then I knew,” Steinbrenner reportedly said at the time. “He will be a great outfielder for me, in the great tradition of Mantle, Maris, DiMaggio and all the others.”
That, of course, didn’t happen.
Elway played well in his lone minor-league season, batting .318 in 42 games with Class A Oneonta. He was truly great at football, though, and looked every bit the next top NFL draft pick after returning to Stanford for his senior season that fall.
“It was pretty easy to see that football should be his sport,” Oneonta manager Ken Berry recalled to ESPN in 2012.
Preferring to play for a better team, Elway used the threat of his contract with the Yankees to force a trade from the Baltimore Colts, who selected him with the No. 1 pick in the 1983 NFL Draft, but then dealt his rights to the Denver Broncos.
After a stellar 16-season career, Elway retired a two-time Super Bowl champion with 300 touchdown passes and 51,475 passing yards.
Just like it did with Brady in 2023, Topps again plays pretend with Bowman Draft by swapping a Hall of Fame football career for one in MLB.
Releasing Wednesday, 2024 Bowman Draft Baseball arrives with a 200-card base set of the top draft picks and prospects — as well as cards featuring Elway with the Yankees. According to Fanatics, Elway is the lone subject in the "Dream Draft Picks" set, which includes a number of variations ranging from a Blue Refractor /150 to the Superfractor 1/1.
Elway will also have a "Dream Draft Picks" Autograph Variation, which includes Gold Refractors /50, Orange Refractor /25, Red Refractors /5 and the Superfractor 1/1.
The latest push from Fanatics to better market its lineup of products, a commercial for 2024 Bowman Draft is packed with famous faces and Easter eggs.
The ad opens with an interview between Elway and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, with Smith questioning why the Yankees would select Elway instead of Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, who was chosen six picks later by the San Diego Padres.
The ad transitions to an imaginary flashback between Steinbrenner and his scouting department, which greatly prefers Gwynn over Elway.
“Nope, it’s Elway. The sky’s the limit for that guy,” replies Steinbrenner, voiced by Seinfeld co-creator Larry David.
Along with David’s cameo, a number of Seinfeld callouts appear in the ad, including references to former Mets star Keith Hernandez, who once made an appearance on the show, and the line “calzone time,” which calls back to an episode where Steinbrenner became obsessed with calzones after trying one George Costanza brought for lunch.
The spot ends when an alarm clock, flanked by an autographed Elway Yankees card, wakes the Broncos legend up from a dream.
Though the appearance in 2023 Bowman Draft was billed as the first for Brady on a baseball card, Elway’s appearance in 2024 Bowman Draft is far from his first on the diamond — though it will be his 1st Bowman.
According to third-party grading tracker GemRate, PSA has graded 28 different Elway cards that are categorized under baseball. Of those cards, Elway’s 1998 Pinnacle All-Star Fan Fest is the most popular with 90 total grades and just six PSA 10s.
The highest public sale for a PSA 10 example, according to data tool Card Ladder, is the $280 paid on eBay in Jan. 2023.
The most popular Topps baseball card of Elway, the 2005 Topps All-Time Fan Favorites, has been graded 50 times with 32 PSA 10s. One example with an autograph authenticated by PSA sold for $417 on eBay in 2019.
Elway was also in the 1982 TCMA Oneonta Yankees set. A BVG 8 sold for $180 last week in Love of the Game Auctions.
To date, the highest public sale for a Brady card from 2023 Bowman Draft is the $158,600 paid for the 2023 Bowman Draft 1995 Bowman Dream Draft Picks Autograph Superfractor 1/1 PSA 9 at Goldin in January.
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct.