General Forum

With the MLB and MLBPA exclusive agreements with Fanatics, is Donruss (Panini) officially out of the baseball market? Was 2022 their final set?

If I recall, the MLBPA agreement with Fanatics officially starts after this season, so there will probably be one last set from Panini.

Not 100% sure. They can go the ITG did for a while with hockey. If they can't make cards with no logo, they can create sets made of prospects and retired veterans or USA baseball or college baseball or stuff like that. Their sets would be more on Bowman's turf.

I think Panini still has a license with the Baseball Hall of Fame.

As of right now, on Panini America's website, NO Major League Baseball cards are listed. 

I personally think it sucks that only Topps/Fanatics has the rights to baseball licensing. I dont care much for Donruss anymore, but i do like some of Panini's stuff and wish Upper Deck were still around in baseball.  And i personally may stop collecting anything from retail/card shops except for single cards/lots of my favorite players/team. I hate Fanatics as a company and Topps has been on a downward spiral for years in terms of quality/customer service. 

Panini has licensing with the MLBPA but not the league, right? Using a player's photo without the team is what they currently do, so is that changing altogether? I mean, Leaf still does the same thing. 

Fanatics has exclusive deals with both MLB and MLBPA. 

I supposed we could still see Elite Extra cards of college players, but I'm thinking that might be it. 

Yeah, College feels like the most likely avenue for future Panini/Donruss baseball sets. But Fanatics certainly already sells plenty of licensed products for NCAA schools, so it wouldn't be shocking to see them try to make a deal with some or all the D1 teams to exclusively use their logos/names on baseball cards. Plus, they could always just try to sign any big-name college players to NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) deals to pump out cards of the most likely first-rounders. Guess we'll see what happens.

Donruss in my view will never be done.