Author: Melissa Bridwell

Collectors often remember the moment when a player stops being a name that looks good in a binder and starts being a market signal. That change didn’t happen all at once for Josh Allen. It got stronger over time, which is how Buffalo usually does things: by being consistent, being strong, and refusing to give up. The card market was wary of Allen when he was picked seventh overall in the 2018 draft. People were skeptical about his college completion rate, and his early rookie prices showed that. For a few thousand dollars, you could get a 2018 Panini National…

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…

Lucky people sometimes don’t say anything about their good luck. It doesn’t come with a big deal or a dramatic reveal. Someone may have dropped it off in a dirty cardboard box on a Tuesday afternoon and asked for enough cash to cover rent. That’s pretty much how it began for the owner of a pawn shop in Houston. He found himself with a small fortune in Pokémon cards while he was judging used guitars and answering calls about used jewelry. It wasn’t in his plans. He hadn’t looked into it. It was getting more and more crowded with obsessive…

Teachers talk about a time when a student stops moving around and just stares. It doesn’t happen very often, and it’s usually done quietly. Not on their phone. Not at that time. At an idea. It doesn’t happen as often as people think, and when it does, it’s usually because of something in the lesson that related to the student’s real life. It’s not a worksheet. Not a test-prep area. A thought that helped understand things better. More and more, that moment is happening in sociology. Specifically, the kind of sociology that explains why school is the way it is—why…

There’s a certain kind of quiet that comes over serious baseball card collectors when they know something important is going on. It wasn’t the noise of a record-breaking sale or a big moment on social media. Instead, there was a steady, knowing acknowledgement that a collection worth studying had arrived. That’s how people feel about Love of the Game’s newest auction, which just started but has already gotten the attention of gamers who don’t usually get excited. There’s a lot in the catalog. There are more than 270 different kinds of cards, including more than 200 cards from the 19th…

The problem that Gradient is trying to solve seems a little strange. It’s not meant to be rude; rather, it’s more like how the best startup ideas often feel obvious after someone else has already found them. Tim Clothier had around 7 million collectible cards. They took up most of his garage and into his living room. From some seats, they even blocked your view of Mount Rainier. He knew how long it would take to sort them by hand: about 25,000 cards a week, over fifteen years of weekends. His wife knew. His friends knew. Most of them changed…

From the outside, this storage unit in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, doesn’t look like much. There are fluorescent lights, concrete floors, and a faint smell of old paper. But inside, stacked in climate-controlled cases and sealed plastic slabs, is what one collector quietly calls his “real portfolio”: rows of graded baseball cards from over 30 years of American baseball history, along with an incredibly large sum of money. This is not the only way that people think. There is a new type of serious collector that has grown over the past few years. They talk less about nostalgia and more about PSA…

The beginning of this story feels almost emotional. Topps. Football. A deal for more than one year. For people who grew up in the 1970s or 1980s and remember taking cards out of packs, this sounds less like a business announcement and more like a welcome home. But don’t get the wrong idea—what Fanatics Collectibles has made here is not a throwback. It is a plan. And it’s a big bet that was made with a lot of thought. The NFL, Fanatics Collectibles, and the NFL Players Association just signed a new multi-year licensing agreement that lets Topps make all…

Markus Delray’s spare bedroom has a wall that has two different stories written on it. On one side, he spent three years putting together a corkboard mosaic with hundreds of wine corks neatly pinned into place. It’s a quiet, tactile record of dinners, parties, and regular Tuesday evenings. On the other, he has neatly stacked plastic sleeves with NFL trading cards inside each one that date back to the spring of 2020. There isn’t a clear link between the two collections. Marcus, on the other hand, thinks they go well together. He had no plans to start collecting cards. At…

Right now there’s a patch inside a card that was sewn onto a young baseball player’s jersey for their first professional game. There was a crowd. There were real nerves. As soon as it was over, that patch was carefully peeled off, sent to a factory, and turned into something that collectors now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for. That’s not an exaggeration. Paul Skenes’ MLB Debut Patch Autograph card has already sold for more than $500,000, and it’s still not priced at what it’s worth. People stop in the middle of scrolling to look at that number, which…