If PSA SHUTS DOWN, Will The Card Market Crash?

PSA has dramatically increased its turnaround times with some orders now taking as long as eight months to get back to you. This has caused some collectors to call for PSA to shut down some or all of its incoming orders. PSA has said they prefer not to do this, but if they have to, what would it do to the sports card hobby as a whole? We're going to debate those ramifications and what the future will likely look like next. Hello, sports card investors, and welcome to another episode of Cards on the Table from the Arena Club studio here inside Cards hq. Scott and Hayley, it is great to see you guys today. Good to be back. Good to see you. You know what the best part is? Whenever I want to see you, I don't have to wait eight months like I do with some of my cards that are now going off to psa. I love them, I get to see them and I put them. I drop them off at our PSA submission center or put them in an envelope and send them off to psa. And it's eight months, up to eight months till I see those precious cards back in my hand. That's a long time to wait. Scott and Haley. It's like having a baby. It's like having a baby. It's like having a baby. And that baby will come back, hopefully in a beautiful PSA Gem Mint 10. Hopefully it's not like a PSA 7. That'd be an ugly baby. You never know something's wrong with the baby. But this is the reality we're now face. Because recently PSA announced that, hey, they're really busy. They're getting more orders incoming than ever before. But this means they still can't get orders out in a timely manner. Turnaround times this year have gotten slower and slower and slower. And they're now getting slower again. PSA adjusted their turnaround, their estimated turnaround times. First of all, they changed the now to ranges, but they move those ranges out and it's especially dramatic for like the bulk level value. Bulk previously was a 95 business day estimated turnaround, now 140 to 160 business days, which is the equivalent of about seven to eight months. That's a long time to have to wait for you to get your orders back. Value went from 75 business days to 100 to 120 business days. And then you've got other levels. Value plus is now 60 to 80 business days. Value max is 40 to 50 regulars, 30 to 40 expresses, 20 to 30. Super express is 7 to 10. So you can get your orders back quicker. You just have to pay, obviously, for it. And I imagine this is going to cause more people to start to do that. But the challenge is, with order lengths taking this long, collectors are. Collectors are saying, like, should PSA even be offering bulk submissions any more, period? Or do we need to go into a scenario like we encountered back in March of 2021? If you remember, during the pandemic, March of 2021, when submission volume got to a level that, believe it or not, was even crazier than what PSA is encountering today, PSA threw up their hands and said, there's no way we can catch up, stop submitting orders. And they literally shut down most of their service levels. And they shut them down for months before you could resubmit your cards again. Now, this did allow PSA to eventually catch back up with their orders, and their turnaround times got a lot better once they. Once they got caught back up again until the last year when they've gotten worse and worse and worse because of this surging demand again. So some collectors are saying you got to do what you did back in the pandemic. You got to shut down levels and get caught back up. But it's got to be a lot more complicated for PSA to do that today than back during the pandemic, because today they've got PSA subcenters open, like here in Sidecards HQ. They take orders at GameStop. They've got, you know, many ways for people to submit. And so they're cutting off, you know, orders. Affects a whole ecosystem in a way that it has never affected it before, which is a challenge. Right? And psa, to their credit, they have absolutely been staffing up like crazy over the last year. And in fact, they're now announcing that they're going to staff up even more. PSA came out earlier this month and said, yeah, we hate to say turnaround times are getting longer, but we are going to be reinvesting $200 million into our company largely to help expand capacity. They've called for hiring a thousand new employees. A thousand new employees. They're also going to add 80,000 square feet to their, oh, I think 800,000 square feet, 800,000 square feet to their facilities to give them more room to do the grading and everything like that. A thousand more employees to fill that 800,000 square feet. So they are committed, and I will give 100% get PSA credit. They have ramped up significantly, like the volume of cars that they can handle right now per month. Which is a little over 2 million. I think 2.2 million is like what they did last month. That's like a million cards more than what they were able to handle a year or a little more than a year ago. So they've ramped up a lot, but it's still not enough to keep up with the growth of the hobby. It's been absolutely crazy. So they've said they don't want to shut down. So this idea of the collector saying they should shut down their services like they did during the pandemic, PSA has said we don't want to do that. They've also said they don't want to raise prices anymore, but something's got to give, right? Like they can't unless they can get all those thousand new employees to start tomorrow. Like they, they may be faced with either more price ranges or, or, you know, having to cut some of these service levels down. And, and I want to get your thoughts on this, Scott, but there's one thing that I just, I hate to say this, I hate to say it, but March of 2021, which was that moment that PSA shut down all these service levels, that was also the moment when the hobby started to go into a multi year decline period and prices started to really, really drop. Now, those two may very well not be correlated, and I could argue, I could tell you a lot of reasons why they're not correlated, but there also is maybe a little bit of correlation there. So as a hobbyist, the idea of like you can't grade with PSA anymore for some period of time, that's a little scary. When I think of the greater sports card market and the health of it and the implications. Scott, what do you think of all this and what should PSA do? Yeah, the first thing, causation versus correlation. You know, are they correlated? It's tough to say, but it's one of those things where we're coming off of. Back in 2020, we had the COVID boom. Everybody was stuck inside. In March 2021, we started to see some normality again as people kind of moved off of sports cards. This feels completely and entirely different. I don't want to say we're early. The fact that PSA is willing to invest $200 million makes me think they're confident enough to think that we are early, which gives me some comfort. When they did their own research and got that investment from an outside group, they should not shut down. In my opinion, they only have so many levers they can pull the first One is more staff, which they pulled. The second one is they can increase turnout times, which they pulled. And the third one is raising prices. And so I think that they could do that again. In all honesty, we're looking at what cards are being submitted to psa. A majority is Pokemon. Like, I have the Gem Raid data right here. Last in March, 700,000 sports cards were submitted, versus 1.4 million Pokemon. Well, TCG cards, with the majority being Pokemon. So it's one of those things where maybe they need to raise the pricing on Pokemon or raise the turnarounds on Pokemon and keep sportsloaders, because that's what I'm talking about. It's a sports card collectors. It's easy for me to say that, but, like, realistically, Pokemon is what's really bogging them down right now for good reason. Pokemon cards, we talked about this on the channel. The main reason they can evaluate a PSA 10 is because there's no parallels. All you have is that grade differential. And so even if they raise the pricing and turnaround times, it's worth those Pokemon collectors to keep submitting because the price gap is so much bigger, and it'll keep going up in value for the PSA 10. Where with us as sports collectors, there's less incentive to submit any base cards at this point. So it kind of hurts us more, I would argue, but just my two cents. A Pikachu tax. Haley, a Pikachu tax. What do you think of this concept? I mean, I think it would be better because then that's less time. I got to wait for my next job. That's right. You know, you don't want to be away from your precious. I know. Eight months, Hayley. I wouldn't know what to do, honestly, you know, but, you know, kind of going off of what you guys were saying, you know, does PSA need to shut down necessarily? I don't think so. You know, they are making great strides to combat everything that's been happening. The first thought that I had was the new employees coming in. My first thought would be, will they be trained, efficient enough, fast enough to not have any mishaps? Or, you know, have one person grade a card a four, and then another grader would grade it an eight. Stuff like that. But like you said, Jeff, the hobby is evolving every single day. It's getting more popular and popular, and for PSA to keep up with the demands, they just. They got to, I guess, keep hiring people. And will there ever be a true way to combat all this? I don't know. You know, it'll be at some point in time. At some point in time. Like there's got to be something, there's got to be a point. But we may be, we may be years away before psa. I mean we had, we had Ryan, the president of PSA in the store. This was a little over a year ago, maybe, maybe a year and a half ago. And he said, when he was here, he said our eventual goal is to get it where every single PSA service level include, including value, bulk is no more than a 30 day turnaround. That'd be so nice. That'd be amazing. It would be so great. But we're also so far away, we're so far away from that. I mean, the delta between 30 days and eight months is humongous. It would be so healthy for the hobby if you could get your cards back from PSA that quickly because it just unlocks the liquidity. Like the challenge is when you've got these massive backlogs of all of these months, you essentially have all of this collector money which is locked up in PSA's incoming mailroom. So what does that mean? That means that the collectors can't then sell those cards and buy new cards or buy boxes. It's like freezing capital. It's like the equivalent of like if you're going to invest in personal money, you're buying like a one year bank CD where you're not allowed to withdraw or touch the money for a year and you have no idea what it's worth because of the condition. Well, that's true too. At least with a bank cd, you know, a year later you get your money back plus some interest in this case. Yeah. God forbid you invested in the, you know, you get, you set off all your, you know, rookie cards of a hot, you know, hot rookie and then you know, he's out of the league by the time you get your cards back a year later. Or he's torn both of his acl. Yes. Like you never know what's going to happen. Do you remember Kyle Lewis? That was what happened with Kyle Lewis back in 2020 as he won rookie of the year, then he was basically out of the league within 12 months. Yeah. And so it can be brutal. I like what you mentioned though, not to change subjects, but if they do train these employees too quickly, then we're going to see more PSA complaints and issues if they increased around time. So some of those things, you have to be really mindful of it. It's a really hard challenge. It's not. These aren't jobs where they can just hire people from off the street and immediately start them and it will immediately make an impact on the backlog. Not for some of the positions, not for probably most of the vast majority of the positions they're hiring for. They're highly, highly trained, highly skilled positions for the people to be effective. So there's no magic bullet here. We're going to be dealing with these turnaround times and possibly even worse ones in the future for a while until that money PSA just reinvested really starts to make an impact. But I think that's months away, unfortunately. Can I ask you a question about this? How does it make you feel as a businessman to see a $200 million injection of cash in their company? Oh, I think it's exciting that they're doing that. I think it, yes, 100%. Going back to your comment from earlier, I think that it shows the strength of the hobby, I think it shows the long term optimism around the hobby because it would be really easy for PSA to say we're just, this thing is a cash cow right now. This backlog is gold for them. It's just assurance of huge profit for months and months to come. And they could just be feeding off this profit, but they're not doing that. They're actually saying, you know what, we believe that where the hobby is right now, it's going to be even better in the future. So we're re injecting. So yeah, I think it's a great sign of everything to come. How long do you think it took, and you don't know this exactly, for a $200 million cash loan to go through? Like how long do you think they've been working on this? Because everybody's main complaint is why didn't they act sooner? Which is a very valid complaint. Like how long this has been in the works for? 6 months? Longer, less time? That's a good question. I, I don't know their, you know, their financing how, you know, how they would do a capital, you know, where is the capital even coming from? I assume they probably are sitting on significant cash, significant savings. So it may not be, that, may not be that hard for them to commit it or, or it may be depending on how their corporate governance takes place, they may have had to go to a capital raise or something of that nature, just depending on how they're structured. But yeah, I mean, do I wish they would have done it earlier? Absolutely. But I think the growth of the hobby has taken them a Little bit by surprise, as it's taken all of us by a little bit by surprise. Like, last year was a great year. I was not really expecting this SEI 500 index to be up over 20%. We're five. We're not even five months into this year, and it's up over 20%, you know, in terms of the value of your, you know, iconic cards. And this is after the thing was up over 30% last year. So it's. It. It's. It has surpassed, I think, a lot of people's expectations. Yeah. Hopefully it keeps going. I think, like, also just one more point. Point. I mean, with how technology driven our society is now, maybe we might start to see AI come into play with these great companies. You know, maybe that might be a solution to keep up with the demand. But, yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple years here. The more they can do with that, I think, the better, for sure. All right, we got to talk about a tcg. We got to talk about a card show banning sealed wax. This is wild. We got to talk about Victor Webignyam as well and his card prices. But first, let's rip a couple of slab packs. Haley, what did you get today? I ended up doing the baseball. Okay, this is Emerald baseball. So this is the 500 emerald baseball slab pack. Cool. White Langford. Yay by Florida game. Not too bad. 2023 Bowman draft gold refractor. Langford has a ton of potential still. He does. Yeah, he does in 12 months. Good young player. What did you rip here, Scott? So we're talking about tcg, and I wanted to keep the spirit of Teapot alive because I know much he loves Pokemon cards. I did a Pokemon pack. Oh, geez. All right, let's see what you got. Speaking of keeping the spirit a teapot alive, A Gengar. That's his favorite Pokemon. Sweet. All right, look at that. You're just contributing to the PSA backlog right here with Biden, as I complain about them today. Okay, I did it. I did an Emerald football. They're Grails, by the way. Right now we got a Justin Herbert national treasures, one of1.cool. RPA is one of the grails. They got a Mahomes, beautiful Mahomes stained glass rookie, as well as a Mahomes black downtown you could possibly get. Did I get one? What did I get from my emerald football pack? Oh, I didn't get one of those, but this is nice. That's nice. That's a Rookie Kaboom. Bryce Young. Bryce Young. Rookie kaboom. And a PSA9. That's. That's. You know what? Yeah. That's worth more than the Slab pack. That's a big W. If you guys want to rip Slab packs of your own, you can get 20% off your first purchase on Arena Club with promo code code sci. All you have to do is download the Arena Club app or go to arenaclub.com buy anything, any of the Slab packs, any of. Any of the foot, any of the sports stuff, and promo code SCI for 20 off your first purchase on Arena Club. All right, let's jump into this next story, guys. We've got a card show maybe behaving badly, depending on your perspective. This is. This happened a few weeks ago. We haven't talked about it yet. I wanted to talk about it today. This is a card show in Maryland that's primarily a TCG show. It's a gaming show in Maryland. The Maryland Feel Good Gaming Show. They announced last month plans to ban vendors from selling sealed product that is currently available at retail. And the reason why they did this was to get flippers out of their local show. And they said flipping had become out of control in their market. And then they later updated their policy to ban attendees from selling sealed product to vendors as well. So you can't. If you want to go to the card show, you better not bring retail sealed product to try to resell. Whether you're a dealer or an attendee, you could get your butt kicked out of the show for doing this. I've never heard of a card show doing that before, but there are some collectors who are cheering them on, saying, we got to get flipping culture out of the hobby. It's escalating wax prices to unreasonable levels. And some think this is a step forward. Scott, what was your take on this? Scalping and flipping are two different things to me. They're removing the scalpers from their card show. Those individuals that go wait at Target or Walmart and stock the workers who stock the shelves and buy all of it and don't let anybody else have any, and then they go sell it for 50 to 80% more. Instantly at the card shop, instantly at the card show. I'm fine with this. I'm actually think it's great because they're not like, restricting everything. It's basically just like the last few months of product, which I think is great. So I think it's a good move because flipping is somebody typically who buys something with the intention of, like, I Think this has value that's not realized yet. So it's a smart play. While if you're scalping, you're literally just hoarding things for yourself in order to take advantage of others, in my opinion. Maybe you can categorize those the same. Maybe it's cope that I'm kind of trying to distinguish the two, but I think it's a really good thing. And it gets a lot of unsavory individuals out of those card shows, makes it less about money at the card shows, which is fun because that's kind of what it's all about nowadays. But I think it can also potentially lower the risk of some of these cards, some of these, like retailers like Walmart locally, having their cards completely wiped out. If there's not an easy way to sell these cards. It can take a ton of time and a ton of shipping materials to ship big boxes of Pokemon cards like the Sam's Club and the Costco boxes. They're huge and awkward. And so if they don't have an easy way to offload those for double their money, maybe they'll be less likely to do it. But doesn't it also take an element away from the card show to say none of the vendors can sell that product? Because now you can't go to the card show and buy a recent retail release at the card show. Those aren't going to exist there. Does that hurt the experience of the average everyday attendee? I don't know. Haley, what was your take on this story, you know, going off of your point? I think if it's, you know, scalpers, I agree. I think it's a great idea to try to less or have less scalpers in the hobby. But also, flipping is such a huge part of this hobby. You know, it's either, you know, you got your collectors or your flippers that are in it, you know, to make a great profit on, you know, even make a living off of doing stuff like this, you know, taking a stride like this at card shows to not have scalpers there. I like it. But also at the same time, I mean, will it be effective? Because they could just go somewhere else and keep doing it. But yeah, like you said, Jeff, will it take away the element of people being able to get that product at retail? Absolutely. It'll take it away from the shows. But yeah, I don't know. I know it would disappoint my son, Harrison. Yeah. Because when I take him to a card show, he loves Pokemon, and when I take him to a card show, he Always wants to buy a box or two. Like that's, you know, he. And he'll go buy sometimes the retail product of a recent release at a card show. Like he'll go find whatever dealers have the retail products and he'll rip a few box. He did it. We were just at the Dallas card show this last weekend. He did exactly that. There was multiple dealers at the Dallas card show that had the recent Pokemon releases retail formats. He went up bottom, ripped him at the table, had a good time doing it. So he would be a little bit disappointed. Well, here's a counter argument for you. Harrison can just buy them himself for cheaper at retail because those individuals that went and bought those boxes to sell them to Harrison don't have an outlet to sell them to him at. Right? So like I know it wouldn't solve that problem. And that's not probably what they're aiming for here. It's probably more so because it was a big distraction and who knows. But I think if we're able to somehow eliminate the scalping mentality from buying Pokemon at retail. Weird thing about Pokemon versus sports cards. In sports cards, retail products typically aren't worth it because of the pack odds differences. Like you get significantly more in a hobby box. But in Pokemon, cards are the same packs in every single configuration, right? You're basically in a booster box getting a slightly better price per pack. That's why you buy those and you get slightly better. Odd just because you have 36 packs versus six. But I think the ideal situation this creates is now those individuals don't even buy those boxes at Target because they can't resell them easily. Maybe interesting. I don't know. What do you guys think out there in the YouTube land? Let us know in the YouTube comments. I want to talk about Wemby. Did you guys see that craziness the other a couple. Couple. Couple nights ago? A few nights ago now. It's been a few nights now. But the Wemby pull up from just beyond the logo to send the game into another overtime. I mean, just unbelievable. This guy and his card prices are doing unbelievable things ever since that moment. No surprise, right? His cards, by the way, are up 85% collectively according to market movers over the last year. So they're already up a lot. That was even before what happened the other night. But since, since their start to the series against against Oklahoma City, you have had some crazy sales, including a one of his 2023 Topps dynasty patch autograph sold Snap. Snap sold like that night for $15,000 on eBay. You also also had one of his 2023 NBA premium stock golds sell for $15,000 on eBay. You had one of his kabooms from 2023 and PSA 7 sold for $18,500 on eBay. And you had one of his 2024 kabooms in PSA 10 sell for $25,000 on eBay. All of these sales happening right after people saw the shot and the win and the 4020 performance performance, all of this types of type of thing. Scott, my question for you. Ohtani has has been and you're a baseball guy, right? Ohtani has been, I, I think many could say the face of sports cards as a whole over the last year. Like if you had to say what athlete is most, you know, recognizable when it comes to sports cards over the last year and what his cards have done and the popularity and everyone chasing them and it's Ohtani I think. Guy, do you think this puts Victor on a path to catch up, to maybe eventually surpass Ohtani as the face of the hobby? I will have bias. I want to acknowledge my bias first before I say this. The one thing I'll say about Victor Webanyama he does things that don't make sense on the basketball court, things that I've never seen and I watched basketball my entire life growing up until more so recently I kind of stopped in the early 2000s. But he does things that just are crazy. He looks like the kid when you're playing seventh grade and there's just one kid, his growth spur earlier. But he's also able to be coordinated. That's what he looks like. So yes he has the potential. Potential is a big word and obviously there's some factors we'll talk about in a moment that could restrict that potential. But I don't know if he will be able to keep up with Ohtani for a couple reasons. Ohtani, his resume is already insane and he's still pretty young. Like I'll just read you some of his accomplishments real quick. Only DH ever to an MVP. He's the only part of the 5050 season 4 MVP so far which is the most ever for a non steroid user, only behind Barry Bonds. He is an NPB MVP winner back in Japan, only modern pitcher and hitter, two time World Series champion, an MPB champion. He's also if you look at like from a pitching perspective out of all pitchers all time, at least since integration back in 1950, he's the fourth best ever in era which takes in consideration the league and how good you are. Only behind Pedro Martinez, Clayton Kershaw and Jacob deGrom. And a WBC champion. Like his resume is amazing and he just continues to get better. So for Wemby, he could get there. But my biggest concern is the resume aspect for Ohtani is amazing. Plus Ohtani has a massive collector base. And Wemby, he's doing it in NBA, which is really hard to stay at the top of your game. And he has a terrible rookie catalog because he didn't sign with Panini. Right. So he didn't sign with Panini, so only has like the non autographed versions. Then he signed with Topps, but all those don't have logos. He is the biggest victim of this weird, ugly divorce that we had with those two companies, which I think could hold back his high end prices, even though he'll have a ton of low end prices just because there's so much out there. Interesting. I don't know if I see that as that big of a problem. Long term. I agree with you. It was during this super awkward period that I hated in the hobby about like his autograph exclusivity is over here. Even though that, you know, the officially licensed cards over here. I hated that period of the hobby. But I don't know if anything, I don't know if that's really going to hold. The cream always rises to the top. Like the good stuff will rise. Good stuff will rise. But that interesting thought. So Scott thinks Wemby. Scott's like, pump your brakes on Wemby. He's got a long way to go here. Don't let me remind you, everything Ohtani's done, plus basketball collectors do this weird thing where they price in so many, so much value before anything happens. Look at Luca. No. Mvp, Football. Football collector. Yeah. And football's even worse. So like I agree with. So much is already baked in. But I, I disagree with your overall sentiment, but I want to hear what Haley has to say. Yeah, I mean, kind of going back to what you said. You know, if you put both their resumes right next to each other, obviously Ohtani has accomplished way more in his career. I also think about it in terms of household names. You know, anybody that loves baseball, any, any sport, they're going to know who Ohtani is. And I think we're seeing Wemby quickly become a household name that everybody knows who he is. And could he overtake the face of the hobby? I think so. I think in time, if he keeps building his resume and with having such a short resume right now, with the impact that he's already having, not having a title yet, not having all these accomplishments compared to Ohtani, I think we're obviously seeing greatness in the making. Not all unicorns are goats, Jeff. I think this ceiling for Wemby is greater than the ceiling for Ohtani, believe it or not, in terms of the hobby potential. Because I think if you look at like what is the number one most collected guy from the past 50 years in the hobby by far, it's Michael Jordan. Like, it's Jordan, Jordan, Jordan, everything. Jordan, Jordan, Jordan. It's a basketball star. I have a counter argument when you're done with that about that one, but I think, I think that even if you continue to go down the list from there, you find guys like Kobe and LeBron and Steph Curry and yeah, you certainly find Ohtani in that mix as well and Ken Griffey Jr. Maybe and kind of up in that mix. But you're. There's on the high end basketball. The basketball collectors on the high end are ferocious and rich and quick to react. There's. There is, in my opinion more high end money in modern basketball amongst the top of the top than there is baseball and football probably combined. And so I just think like if that modern basketball high end group that has all the exquisites and has all the PMGs and all these records, that if they all say Victor's the guy and they're all, they're all starting to pour money into Wemby, which by the way, is starting to happen right now. The. If that trend continues, Victor will just, he will sail past Ohtani even if his resume doesn't warrant it. He will sail past Ohtani just because the amount of money that that high end basketball collector group has and can direct to Victor. And I don't know that there's, there's not as much high end money in my opinion that can possibly go into Otani. Now Otani, you got the Asian market. So some people may argue with what I'm saying, but basketball has got a huge Asian market as well. And people are people, people from that market are absolutely going to be all in and on Wendy as well, even though he's not obviously from Asia the way that Ohtani is. Here's, here's my counterargument to that. I agree with what you said about LeBron and Michael Jordan and Steph Curry being more collectible than any baseball player in a long time. The issue is every baseball player basically since the 1950s, has had an issue of some kind in regards to modern collecting. Barry Bond got caught doing steroids. So even though he has the best statistical performance of all time for his entire career, people kind of have that mark against him. Ken Griffey Jr. He was horrible past age 30 and he never won a championship. Mike Trout made the playoffs once in his career and he played at the wrong time when the hobby blew up back in the 2010s. Ohtani is the first player in my opinion probably since, you know, at least in the modern hobby, since the year 2000 that is going to have that hype. He is the Michael Jordan of baseball cards and he's going to be the Michael Jordan of baseball cards moving forward. And there are significant basketball collectors moving into the Ohtani market. Right now we're seeing his high end cards go crazy. And Ohtani's like rookies are more straightforward than women. Yamas. So while, yes, Victor, he has to do so much and we haven't talked about his health issues, not even, not injury issues, health issues, a difference there. So I think Ohtani is in a position where he's going to be the goat of basketball, I mean, sorry, of baseball forever. And I think that's going to help him have a higher market. But I do think wembanyama with what I saw, what I've continued to see, he's incredible too. So if he stays healthy, it's all about health for him. It's going to be fun to watch. Yeah. All right, we got one last topic to talk about quickly. There was a sale recently. This, I think was this last weekend, Scott, that caught my attention on heritage auctions. It was a 2013 Bowman Chrome draft picks. Aaron Judge, Super Fractor, one of one. But here's why it caught my attention. Not, not just because that's a, that's a big card and it sold for $838,000. I mean that alone is a reason for it to catch your attention. But did you notice, Scott Haley, that it had one of those little gold stickers on top of it? You know, right there, right below the grading label, it had one of those little gold NBA stickers stickers. And this is notable, in fact, we're seeing more and more modern cards get these gold stickers, these NBA stickers which are meant to designate cards with very high eye appeal. In in fact, NBA will give one of their gold stickers to a card that they believe is within the top 5% of cards of that grade in terms of eye appeal. They also have silver stickers which I believe are the top 30% of cards in that grade in terms of eye appeal. And then they have the very rare and elusive black sticker which is I think the top, top 1%, the top of the top for that, you know, for that card in that grade, for that eye appeal. Scott, you, you, you already laughing over believer in this. Scott. What? Why did you not like to see this on that card that sold for that for that record price? If we like Mike Baker's opinion so much, go grade with Mike Baker's grading company. If it's that important to you. Why are we grading the grades of other graders? It's just silly to me. Like I don't understand the thought process of a gold sticker saying it's in the top. I know, I understand. I'm going to be a little bit annoying here, but I understand that there's one Aaron Judge super fracture. So why do we have to say it's in the top 10% of like super fractures? It's, it's a 101, like the I appeal aspect. It's a 1 to 1. And the fact that we are paying huge amounts higher on some of these stickers is mind blowing to me. I understand the purpose of it for some vintage because even though all grading companies and say psa, but all grading companies say their standards don't change. If we look at some of the old graded PSA twos and threes and fours compared to modern twos, threes and fours, they look completely different. A lot of the old fours look like ones nowadays. So to have the sticker there, sure, I can understand it. Have Mike, who actually I think used to work for PSA go in and get that opinion on there. But like, I think it's so overblown. I was actually looking and I saw like a Ken Griffey Jr. Let's talk about 1989 upper deck, shall we? A 1989 upper deck. 126,000 of those have been submitted. 5,000 or so PSA tens and about 30,000 PSA nines. How do we know it's really in the top whatever percent besides just some person's opinion? Just take the grading company's opinion. Who graded the card. Why are we grading grades? I don't understand it for modern. I completely disagree with you. It doesn't surprise me. Do you, wait, let me ask you, do you have cards with those stickers? Okay, so that's why you disagree. The thing about stickers, these are just for money. That's it. That's it. Value it's money. Why do people care about a Beckett black Label? It's the same thing. The top 1% gets the Beckett Black Label. The Beckett Pristine 10 is the top 5%. And then everything else is a 9,5 gem mint. Right? Like it's, it's, it's the same concept. It's the best of the best. Gets the most black label or the pristine 10. And people like it for that reason. What Mike Baker is kind of doing is essentially bringing that philosophy to a PSA card. I think with a Ken Griffey Jr. That's the perfect card to do it with because there are thousands and thousands of that 1989 upper deck Ken Griffey Jr. Rookie card in PSA 10 condition. Over 5K, over 5,000. So how do you differentiate between those 5,000 in PSA 10 condition? Because certainly of that 5,000, some are better centered than others because PSA allows 55, 45 up to up to 60, 40 is, is, you know, more so what they used to allow. So there are certain copies of the PSA 10 of that card where if you looked at it, you're like, that is flawless. And then there's plenty of other copies of PSA 10 of the same card where you look at it and go, yeah, it's nice. It's. But it's a little off. You know, it's a little off in some way. Right. So for him to say, you know what? I'm going to put stickers on the ones that are the best of the best, I think it's kind of cool. Which is why I given him a lot of my cards over time to put stickers on. You know, my thought process is when I try to get a card graded by PSA through the cross hold, like the. Through the holder itself, they won't do it because they can't tell if there's problems with the card. Why can Mike. Why can he see through the holder and see there's actually his is. I appeal. It's not about actual condition. I understand that. Which is also another problem with it. It's just like how shiny it is through a case. But to give you an idea on the black label, I actually have that as an example. I think it's different because it's a professional grading company. You can see the card in hand and actually see those issues where we can't see. They see that through the case. So I think it warrants the premium. You could argue. I actually have an example of one that sold. I'm so sorry, Haley. Oh, no, you keep going. Jeff and I are passionate about this, apparently. But there's a card that just sold the bubble mew. Familiar with the bubble mew? Your son probably collects bubble mew. And one sold for $200,000 in a BGS10 black label. It's a pop two extreme. Extreme, you know, crazy. It's extreme multiplier versus 15,000 PSA10s. So it kind of just goes back to like. But there's difference. There's two BGs ten black labels. So is Mike can go look at one of the two and say, oh, this one's 0.00001% more centered. And now that's worth $400,000. I mean, it just gets crazy. All right, Haley, you get to play judge here. You get to decide. Come on. Are you team Scott Listen or you team Jeff? I gotta be honest. The one main thought that I had about this topic, you summed it up perfectly with how I feel. I think if you have 100 of the exact same card graded the exact same way, I do like having the eye appeal label on there. To differentiate. I can't even say that word. You're doing great. Thank you. To distinguish, you know, the best out of those 100. I do like that. From a collector aspect from. And like you said, you know, you could have two cards that are greater than 10, but one of them is going to be slightly, you know, different from the other. So to be able to have something that. That you could see across 100 cards. I do like that. So I do agree with you. All right. I do that. Haley has lost favor. That's okay. So why doesn't PSA see this and say we need to make our own gold label like SGC does? I don't think they want to do that because the second they do that, it devalues their non gold label, which is actually. Maybe you could argue what Beckett's problem is. Actually what CGC's problem is. People want to think their card is a. They want to get the best grade. They want to get the best grade they can. So the very fact that those higher, by the way, SGC has. Has that with their gold label. CGC with pristine, BGS with black label and pristine. And what is the market share of those three compared to psa? I think that actually does have something to do with it. I think people just like the simplicity of the 10. But then once people get the 10, then if they want to be a little extra greedy and run to Mike Baker and get a sticker they can do that, but that's their option at that point. And if their car doesn't get a sticker, they don't have to tell anyone. It's like, oh, it's a 10. That's true. Yeah, yeah. You start disclosing that for being honest to people. I don't know. Got to tell people next time you sell a card that didn't get the sticker, you got to tell them you got it. You got to disclose that. Is it really? Is that the rule? You got to do it. All right. I don't know. All right, what do you guys think of all this? Let us know in the YouTube comments. And don't forget to go get your own Arena Club slab pack with promo code SCI at checkout to give you 20% off your first purchase on Arena Club. Thanks for watching. We'll see you soon with our next one. Take care.