Ohtani Added 34 PSA 10s This Week. His Gem Rate Still Dropped.

The Ohtani PSA 10 population moved from 17,249 to 17,283 this week. The gem rate dropped from 55.53% to 55.45%. Both things happened at the same time because the denominator, total submissions, is growing faster than the numerator of top grades. That is the structural reality of a card still deep in its submission arc. Collectors pricing a PSA 10 Ohtani on scarcity assumptions need to reckon with a pop that added 34 copies in a single week, a pace the vintage cards on this list will never replicate.

The 2025 Topps Chrome Cooper Flagg added only two PSA 10 copies this week, moving from 144 to 146. That modest pop gain is less interesting than the gem rate, which compressed from 18.85% to 18.74%. At 146 PSA 10s total, this card is early enough in its submission arc that the next few weeks will show whether that rate stabilizes or keeps compressing. Two possibilities explain the compression: graders are tightening on modern Chrome, or the easiest copies have already been submitted and the remaining pool skews harder to gem. Either reading matters for how the market prices the top grade, and one week of data cannot settle which it is.

The 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan gem rate moved from 1.09% to 1.08%. The 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. moved from 3.20% to 3.19%. The Jordan PSA 8 population grew from 9,413 to 9,423; the Griffey PSA 9 from 34,748 to 34,765. These are not signals. At submission paces typical of 40-year-old cards, a 0.01-point gem rate move is the expected noise of a distribution that has been accumulating for decades and is long since established. The value of tracking them week over week is not to find movement. It is to confirm there is none.

The 2003 Topps LeBron James gem rate slipped from 11.70% to 11.68% as the PSA 7 pool added nine copies, moving from 2,110 to 2,119. The 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout gem rate edged from 42.13% to 42.10%, with the PSA 10 population gaining two copies to reach 7,102. Neither card is generating the kind of weekly volume that would make its gem rate a live market variable right now. They sit between the vintage cards, where movement is noise, and the Ohtani, where movement is structural.

The Flagg gem rate is the number with the most information content over the next few weeks. At 18.74% on a population of 146 PSA 10s, it is still early enough in its arc that a continued compression would be a meaningful read on how hard this card is to gem as the submission pool matures. On the Ohtani, the question is whether the PSA 10 pop growth rate is holding steady or beginning to slow: 34 copies in a week is a single observation, not a direction. This barometer has read 51 of its 768 tracked series more than once, so the comparisons being built now are the foundation the long-run data will rest on.