Some stories seem almost too good to be true. A professional athlete, a torn ACL, and millions of dollars in earnings over the course of their career. But when you look at what Blake Martinez has actually made for a while, the neatness goes away. It’s now time for something more interesting: a business decision that was made after more thought than most people realize.
Martinez played linebacker in the NFL for six years and made over $28 million. In 2017, he tied for first place in the league in tackles. It’s been said that he was like a quarterback for the defense—calling coverages, reading formations, and making changes on the fly. It was likely that he’d get better, find a new team, and keep playing after he tore his ACL in 2021 and was eventually let go by the New York Giants. It works like that most of the time.
He instead went back to a side activity he had been doing since early 2020, when the pandemic made many people turn to strange hobbies. He started buying Pokémon cards seriously, spending $30,000 on a couple of boxes at the start. He then watched livestreams on the platform Whatnot to see what happened when he opened them. People showed up. We sold cards. In the end, one sold for $672,000.
Take a moment to think about that number. Sixty-two thousand dollars. For just one card. Some parts of the Pokémon market are operating at a level that would make any trading floor stand up and take notice. This is something that most people still half-dismiss as nostalgia-driven speculation.
Martinez turned the side project into a business called Blake’s Breaks by July 2022. Later that year, the Las Vegas Raiders signed him and gave him a real chance to get back into the NFL. He spent about a month in camp before what he calls his “turning point.” He quit football and began working 80 hours a week in the card business. Blake’s Breaks now has warehouses in Miami and Denver, and a third one is on the way in New Jersey. The company has made more than $6.5 million on Whatnot. He hires 15 outside workers. Every week, the company puts on about 60 livestream events.
It’s easy to forget that Martinez’s story starts with a six-year-old boy who spent his chore money at a Circle K food store. He carried a binder full of more than a thousand cards to his sister’s gymnastics practices so he could trade with his friends. In the end, his mom gave the collection to someone else. For almost twenty years, he didn’t think about it again. After Logan Paul began selling cards again on the internet, something clicked.
It seems like Martinez knew right away, maybe even instinctively, that this wasn’t just about nostalgia. It had to do with systems. Buying, selling, streaming, reinvesting, and grading. He talks about running the business like he used to talk about running a defense: calling plays, managing people, and making changes when something isn’t working. A quarter of the profits are put back into the business. The rest of them back Martinez and his team. He is the only one who decides what to buy and sell.
He has said that he misses football. Early this year, the Super Bowl brought some of that back. He also says that his shoulder doesn’t hurt when he wakes up in the morning. It doesn’t hurt his back. Open packs hurt his fingers more than anything else. For someone who lived off of taking hits for six years, that’s a big deal.
Long-term goals include building warehouses in Canada and the UK, expanding into comics, and eventually making $25 million in sales from a variety of collectibles. It’s still not clear if the Pokémon card market can keep growing at that rate in the long term or if Martinez’s rise will continue even after the hobby’s popularity dies down. He’s moved so carefully so far, though, that it’s hard to say no.
