TWO WEEKS AFTER New Year’s Day, there was a bidding war on a baseball card in the Goldin collector’s market. Bidding opened at $30,000 and rose to $101,000 by the next day, accumulating 14 bids by midnight. A high-end collector, who goes by Shyne150, shelled out $474,000 on a 2020 Bowman Chrome Prospect Autographs Superfractor, a literally one-of-a-kind rookie, minor league prospect card – believed to be the most ever made. card featuring a player who has yet to appear in Double-A.
“That’s extreme interest,” Ken Goldin, the founder and executive chairman of the market name, says. “That’s Fernando Tatis Jr., Ronald Acuna Jr., Juan Soto interest.”
The prospect was years from The Show. The card was a serial numbered one-of-one featuring Jasson Dominguez, the young Low-A switch hitter of the then New York Yankees who had played 57 games of baseball. minor league at time of sale.
The world of card collecting was stunned: by the total, the name on the card and the brazenness of Shyne’s prospecting – a term for investing in the cards of unproven players before they blossom or are opened. The practice had become de rigueur, but the investment was generally more conservative.
Shyne did not see Dominguez as inexperienced or his investment risky; he saw a potential that was waiting to be realized and a profit margin that should be considered. After all, baseball provides a longer runway for prospects to succeed than football or basketball.
“Even if you tried to buy the Dominguez from me for $200,000 more than I paid for it,” Shyne, 40, says now, “I wouldn’t even consider it. … Dominguez isn’t mature yet, like a bond. You just have to wait.”
The expectations surrounding Dominguez were almost unprecedented (“He’s like Mike Trout,” one general manager told ESPN’s Jeff Passan when he was signed in 2019); the equally high comparisons (a set of skills “like Mickey Mantle,” international director of scouting said Passan) and the nickname (“The Martian,” or El Marciano, created in his native Dominican Republic) unforgettable. The Yankees gave him a franchise-record $5.1 million signing bonus, using 95% of their 2019-20 international bonus pool on the 16-year-old free agent.
Dominguez’s 2021 debut — after COVID canceled the 2020 minor league season — was lukewarm. In those 57 games, between Rookie ball and Low-A, he hit .252 with five homers. He was no longer the Yankees’ top prospect. Still, Dominguez was promoted to High-A before the 2022 MLB Futures Game (his second appearance) and emerged as the focal point of hypothetical trades for superstar outfielder Soto or ace Luis Castillo.
The promise of stardom – his MLB debut is projected in 2024 – was evident in his trade value, but Dominguez’s team will not reap the rewards for years, if at all.
Big league teams have been taking that risk for a long time. But for sports card collectors who invest hundreds of thousands — even with the hobby’s staggering unpredictability and a looming recession — it was something new. Dominguez, who doesn’t turn 20 until February, would need to become, at the very least, a multiple-time MLB All-Star for Shyne’s bet to pay off. That’s a great game.
“Timing is everything,” PWCC Marketplace director of business development Jesse Craig says. “Some people prospect as a short-term gamble, some long-term…
“And some really think that their guy is going to be the next big thing.”
SHYNE’S REAL NAME is Matt Allen, but that’s not something you’ll see on his social media run. About four years ago, Allen invested money he made from private equity in cards. (“This is something I really don’t want to get into,” Allen says when asked about his background. “A lot of people want to know the story.”) “I used my profits in my passion,” he says. now, he wields a sports card collection that, by his own estimation, is worth more than $100 million.
He sold an autographed Luka Doncic rookie patch (called an RPA, which includes an embedded jersey piece) for $4.6 million, which briefly held the record for the most expensive basketball card of all time. On Instagram last December, he showed an RPA of LeBron James that he says he paid $2.4 million for. Rookie Justin Herbert’s one-of-a-kind card, for which he says he paid $550,000, just sold for $1.8 million at a Goldin auction. Allen says he bought a red Bowman Chrome refractor (numbered out of five) by Julio Rodriguez for $50,000 a year and a half ago; it just sold at auction in early August for $276,000.
He also has a Triple Logoman that boasts James, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, which one industry headliner told ESPN is the biggest modern card in existence.
Allen, who started collecting at 7, is a tentpole of the hobby’s entrepreneurial evolution — one that has allowed him to rub elbows with some of the most famous people in the world. He breaks boxes with Drake, he can tell you where the bathroom is in Kardashian’s house (OK, it’s Rob’s) and he’s friends with Logan Paul.
The perpetually aviator-clad Allen is known for his big bets and bigger flings. So when industry experts say that half a million on Dominguez is a prospecting outlier and not the new normal, Allen counters.
“What seems expensive today will seem cheap tomorrow,” he says. “… I’m not even paying attention [to the day-to-day value of the paper]. I’m so long on it that it doesn’t even matter. If I said, “Hey, I’ll give you X for the paper right now,’ that’s not even an option.
“I’m not trying to make money now.”
Instead of waiting to see if Dominguez is the second coming of Mickey Mantle — or Roy White … or Kevin Maas, for that matter — Allen overpaid now rather than risk not being able to get him when (or if) Dominguez starts. launch moonshots in Monument Park.
“[Other collectors] wouldn’t pay $120,000 today for a card that sold for $100,000 yesterday; they would feel foolish,” says Allen. But according to Goldin, there is a growing group of collectors who, armed with better than average sports knowledge, are taking a calculated risk – for better or worse.
“It’s common that people are looking, but the Dominguez case is prospecting – and I know this is a bad word – on steroids,” Goldin says. “He’s a Yankee, Yankee fans and collectors are clamoring for a little draft pick to be their next superstar. If he is, the card will be in the millions.”
Bob Means, who oversees eBay’s sports card category, says, “In these early stages, I don’t know if [prospects are] thinking about the downside. I think it’s part of the hunting.”
Allen says that while others in the hobby were deciding whether paying futures prices was a good strategy, he was actually doing it. “It has pushed the private market in the last 3½ years tremendously,” he says. “Me and Ken [Goldin].”
Craig notes that, before the pandemic, the margins for success were not so slim. “Search prices are much more expensive than three years ago because everyone already understands what the bottom line could potentially be.”
Recent multi-million dollar sales, high demand from an influx of collectors and the sheer rarity of one-of-a-kind cards justify Allen betting big on Dominguez. Despite this, he admits that the sale was met with wide eyes. (One hobbyist called Allen shocked after the sale was finalized, saying: “Bit of a stretch, Matt?”)
Sure, Allen says he paid $100,000 for Wander Franco Superfractor in 2019, two years before the former top prospect debuted with the Tampa Bay Rays. But Dominguez was much riskier; there was less sample size to work with. Allen could try to capitalize on that unrealized potential at any time but, if Dominguez is as good as the billing, that return on investment could rise.
“Then later, [flippers, or prospectors who pay money at the first opportunity] are throwing themselves because it’s worth $1,000,000,” says Allen, who claims to have turned down an offer of $1.8 million for said Franco recently. “So it’s the people who make that little percent margin…or people who can afford to keep it. We’ve spent like $9 million on paper in the last three weeks and I haven’t even gotten anything out of that.”
Craig notes an example: A friend has one Superfractor of Seattle Mariners rookie sensation Julio Rodriguez, a 2022 MLB All-Star and likely AL Rookie of the Year. After his heroics in the Home Run Derby, he was offered $1,000,000 for it. He refused it.
“The prospect, in general, is a gamble,” says Craig. “Some people can actually look at a player, see that he’s a five-tool guy, in the right organization and situation, and make an educated bet that he’s going to be a superstar.”
When Mike Trout’s 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Prospects Superfractor sold for $3.94 million in August 2020, he was already a three-time AL MVP. Goldin rattled off names of the supposed next big things of yesterday, all hyped before their first MLB Opening Day. There was Bryce Harper and Ichiro on one side, and Stephen Strasburg and Gregg Jefferies on the other.
“Oh, actually,” he said. “This is the most obvious one…”
Comparing DOMINGUEZ WITH Ken Griffey Jr. it is, at once, astonishing and fitting. Within the hobby, Griffey’s iconic Upper Deck rookie card — the first card in its debut release in 1989 — is the most famous example of searching, both from the point of view manufacturing as well as collection.
It is the reason that modern search is what it is. It also almost killed the hobby.
In the late 1980s, sports cards were a billion dollar business. A hobby shop called The Upper Deck has partnered with businessmen entering the industry, with lofty aspirations: Start creating superior baseball cards.
Topps’ half-century monopoly on baseball cards ended in 1980, allowing new companies to compete in the space. But card technology was rudimentary and Upper Deck knew that collectors wanted upscale products: higher-quality cardstock, foil package wrapping instead of wax, fraud-deterring hologram technology, all that motivate consumers to devour a product that costs double, per pack, what Topps costs. Even their credo was decades ahead of its time: “Upper Deck: For the kid on the street and the Wall Street investor.”
But they wanted their debut release to start with a wunderkind, rather than the conventional established star.
In 1988, Griffey was raking in High-A San Bernardino, which played home games 7 miles away from the school attended by an Upper Deck employee; he would eventually choose him as the face of the debut set. Junior finished the season at Double-A Vermont and had never been photographed in a Seattle Mariners uniform, so Upper Deck passed up a Seattle giveaway on a Sports Illustrated photo of him in San Bernardino gear, even though even bullish estimates pegged him as a mid-season call-up. .
When “The Kid” hit .397 in spring training and made the Opening Day roster, collectors went hunting for Griffey’s rookie en masse, which is where things went wrong.
Unbeknownst to collectors at the time, Upper Deck reportedly printed over two million Junior rookie cards. To this day, it is one of the two highest graded cards of all time. It was an era without transparency of how much each paper manufacturer produced. Baseball, always the most popular pastime sport, was powering the entire industry. And the overproduction, combined with the 1994 MLB strike, almost sank it – Junior’s smiling face the scapegoat.
Serial numbering was introduced in the early 1990s and one of those debuted around 1997. Paper collecting largely remained a niche for the next decade, but as the economic recession of the late 2000s wreaked havoc, those with disposable incomes sought investments outside of volatiles. stock market. Investing in paper from 2008 to 2018 proved more stable and profitable (from a return on investment perspective) than the S&P 500; the paper industry was reborn as portfolio diversification.
“Chase” cards (the cards collectors hunt and capitalize on) are often rookie cards signed one at a time. One-of-one doesn’t exist without that rookie Griffey.
Allen $474,000 Gamble on Dominguez – the rarest card of a prospect billed to write record books under the brightest, famous lights of the MLB – is not only a natural progression of the industry, but has a direct lineage from Junior. It’s also a perfect storm of the collection’s evolution since the late 2000s.
But in 1989, with Upper Deck boxes running consumers $35, searching for “The Kid” wasn’t a mortgage-leveraging endeavor. In 2022, with a high-end card market producing boxes worth thousands, risky pursuits could decimate a savings account, another temptation as legalized gambling unravels across the United States .
But searching successfully, now more than ever, can also mean early retirement. For those who can afford it, that’s a risk worth taking.
“Papers were never considered an alternative asset class [until the last five years],” says Goldin. “People are looking at [cards] like the next big biotech company.”
ANTHONY GIORDANO RESISTED having his 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card graded and sold for decades, despite being repeatedly offered millions. When he finally gave in and sold it for an all-time sports collection record of $12.6 million in late August, it was what a generation — of his family and those in the industry — had been waiting for: L -first eight-figure paper sale.
It’s also the pie-in-the-sky denouement for Allen’s Dominguez paper.
But Mantle and his holy 1952 Topps card have long been inked. Dominguez’s story is not only still being written; the pen barely touched the paper.
So when Dominguez dropped a fly ball in the second inning of the 2022 Futures Game, laughed, then hit a prodigious home run into the bleachers at Dodger Stadium in the next half inning, it was a reminder of the risk-reward of prospecting .
“Look, Dominguez in five years can be washed away and [prospectors] are on the next new thing,” says Allen. “A lot of it is hype.”
But that didn’t stop him from happily reading Dominguez’s stats as if, literally, from the back of his baseball card. He was watching the Futures Game when Dominguez’s ferocious swing, punctuated by a helicopter finish, deposited a round-tripper in the seats at Chavez Ravine, perhaps heralding his future.
“Man,” he chuckled, “Everybody’s going to be crazy for Dominguez now.”
Bryce Harper, who landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated aged 16, has been labeled a prodigy. Since arriving in the majors in 2012, he has won Rookie of the Year, collected two MVPs and been named to seven All-Star games. Pretty good, right? Several industry experts unanimously dub Harper a hobby disappointment — “He was supposed to catapult a franchise, be the next Mickey Mantle,” says Craig — relative to expectations.
“Modern cards are naturally more volatile. There is risk when a player is active,” says Craig. “I’m a risk-averse guy, so if I was investing half a million dollars in a paper, I’m going to go vintage.”
Means also thinks vintage is more reliable: “When you’re looking at Willie Mays, there’s no new story — Willie Mays is Willie Mays. Done. … [But] we’ve seen people stumble, where some no one lays eggs during a playoff series People can have slumps.
“Next thing you know, you’re seeing 20%, 30%, 50% drops in their paper values.”
With all eyes on Dominguez in the Futures Game, Yankees center fielder Aaron Judge had to play on the same field, in the All-Star Game itself, three days later. Judge, in the midst of one of the best seasons in baseball history, was chasing the American League single-season home run record. And yet, in May, his 2013 rookie Superfractor sold for $150,000 less than what Allen paid for Dominguez.
What about reigning AL MVP and two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani, who does things in professional baseball not seen since Babe Ruth? His autographed Superfractor 2018 went for about 39% of Dominguez’s sum.
Dominguez, for his part, was not yet challenging hallowed records or making an MVP push. He had been playing with the Hudson Valley Renegades. He debuted on July 22 by hitting a game-tying ninth-inning blast against the Wilmington Blue Rocks, sending shockwaves through social media. Two days later, as the MLB trade deadline closed, Twitter nearly caught fire when Renegades manager Tyson Blaser pulled Dominguez from a game after six innings.
Was Dominguez being traded? No. His Renegades had a comfortable lead, and Blaser felt his star had earned a rest. The deadline passed, too, and Dominguez remained unmoved.
The Yankees made several moves — but they weren’t for Soto, who went to the San Diego Padres, or Castillo, who was dealt to the Mariners.
Time will tell if this is a good thing for the Yankees – and for Allen. One thing’s for sure: Dominguez’s card value is higher with him in pinstripes.
“The market is important and the Yankees are the epicenter of baseball markets,” says Craig. Allen says the epicenter is why he bought the paper.
He knows that Dominguez is a work in progress. But he also oozes a rare five-tool talent that made him a scout darling through grainy YouTube clips of batting practice.
As Dominguez’s competition improved, so did his game; he had 16 extra-base hits and 17 steals, while hitting .306 with an on-base percentage of nearly .400, in his 40 games with the Renegades. In his last game in High-A, he hit two home runs, one from each side of the plate.
Allen was ecstatic when Dominguez graduated in September to Double-A Somerset — his second promotion in 61 days — following his South Atlantic Player of the Week honor. After some growing pains — he went 2-for-23 in his first six games as a Patriot — he compiled a .563 batting average and 1.838 OPS in his last four.
Better? He slugged two homers in Somerset’s final game of the season, a streak-clinching victory that lifted the Patriots to their first Eastern League title, and their first since becoming a Double-A affiliate. A Yankees.
“I’m getting calls,” Allen says cheekily, “saying he’s pretty much the hottest Yankee in their farm system.”
In fact, Allen said, one of his friends wants the card, a symbolic interest of the market’s ever-evolving clientele. He is a minority owner of an MLB team, who texted Allen from his yacht, off the Amalfi Coast.
Although Allen says he’s not concerned with the ebbs and flows of it all, he figures he could get at least $600,000 for the Dominguez card if he wanted to. But he is holding out for more.
“That card can break a million dollars,” he says, “before it even gets to the major leagues.”
