Editor's Note

There is something undeniably optimistic about the beginning of the baseball season. Maybe it’s because it comes shortly after the new year, or that it’s a sign of spring and the days are getting longer. I remember being a kid and enjoying this time of year because my Houston Astros were back in the news and new baseball card releases were starting to show up at our local card shops.

Things are a bit different these days. The proliferation of online sports news outlets means that nearly all sports are discussed year-round, and new card sets seem to drop frequently. Still, it’s exciting to see baseball players in Arizona and Florida knocking the cover off the ball in spring training camps.

At PSA we don’t have the luxury of an off-season to relax, but this spring is still an exciting time for the company. We are moving forward at full speed to open our new grading facilities in New Jersey and Tokyo. The Goldin Marketplace is now open and is a fantastic opportunity for collectors to buy and sell their cards. We have improved the PSA app and added a new $30 service level to our ticket authentication and grading program. We recently expanded our imaging program to include all grading levels, meaning that we are now imaging every card (front and back) that is submitted for grading and making those images available publicly. And we implemented yet another feature with imaging at the center: front and back images of every raw card submitted. Provided after the Research & ID stage, these images allow collectors to review their raw cards for consistency and report any identification errors to the proposed labels (flips) prior to grading.

The truth is we are bursting at the seams with plans to continue improving our current services and grow to serve the hobby in new and exciting ways. I am thrilled about all that is happening at PSA and how our team is able to adapt to the needs of the hobby and offer new services to streamline our customers’ hobby experiences.

It’s an exciting time to be a member of the hobby and a part of PSA.

Best,

Nat Turner CEO, Collectors

They had done a handful of trades in the previous several months, so when Mike Kadoch reached out to Grant Slayton one mid-January night and said, “Got any Jordans I want?” Slayton was not about to dismiss the inquiry. Slayton ran down his inventory in his head. SPx Grand Finale? Nah. Topps Finest Test Refractor? Mike had it.

“I said I didn’t, other than the Championship PMG, which is my favorite card,” Slayton said. “I sent him a picture and wrote, LOL.”

This was a 1997 SkyBox Metal Championship Precious Metal Gems of card No. 23, Michael Jordan, one of the iconic parallel cards in the legendary lore of His Airness, limited to just 50 copies, in a PSA 8 grade, one of only six, with only three PSA 9 versions grading higher.

Kadoch went silent.

Then the message came over.

There was no LOL in this message. Kadoch was dead serious. Slayton was intrigued.

And thus began the trade of the year, even if it’s only April: 301 of the most epic ‘90s parallels, modern Gold Prizms and defining rookie cards you could imagine for one of the best parallel cards of all time.

THERE’S GETTING IN AT THE RIGHT TIME AND THEN THERE’S GETTING IN AT THE RIGHT TIME . ASK BITCOIN OWNERS THE DIFFERENCE.

As a child of the ‘90s, Slayton remembered growing up with just enough money to scrounge around a pack or two. He was enamored with the classic inserts of the day, but those might have been holy grails to him. Untouchable.

By the late-’90s, he’d move on to other things, always keeping one toe in the hobby.

Finally, in 2012, he dove back in.

In 1997, one of his neighbors pulled a Kobe Bryant 1997 Fleer Ultra Platinum Medallion, and every so often, even as he aged out of the hobby and onto other pursuits, Slayton thought about the card. Fifteen years later, Slayton looked up the old neighbor and asked if he still had the vaunted second-year Kobe. He did. Slayton hadn't looked up the value in years, but quickly found out that one had recently sold for $1,500. He was shocked. He was ready to fork over a small fortune, but the neighbor sold him that card and four others for $1,000. He sold the other four cards for $1,000 quickly and kept the Kobe. He still has it, with house money to buy more.

“The Kobe Platinum was my re-entry into the hobby and it just gripped me so hard,” he said. “Look, this was a tough scrape but I knew it was worth it. Money was not good, life was tough. I graduated and ran into a worldwide recession a year later. Got my real estate license two days after I turned 18 and jumped right into that game at the wrong time. Putting that money together was not easy at all.”

But it did prove to him that there were values to be had if he just looked hard enough, and boy did he look.

Craigslist, sports cards forums and eventually Facebook and more. He’d scour local Craigslist pages and pretend to be from those cities before saying, “By the way, I’m in Wisconsin.” He’d search Charlotte for Hornets greats and Milwaukee for the big Bucks. He’d pretend to be from Portland if he spotted a Clyde The Glide and Charlotte if he found a Grandmama. He found Reggies in Indy and The Admiral in San Antonio.

Little by little, he started building an absolute hoard of the best inserts and parallels of the ‘90’s most relevant — and very many irrelevant — players. He quickly learned that for every passionate Jordan and

Kobe collector there existed the world’s foremost Vinny Del Negro obsessive. He was able to open a bar and restaurant in 2015, which helped fund his hobby. He’d hop on eBay with a “couple thousand bucks” and feel like a king. When he’d walk into local card shows with thick stacks, he practically floated on air. But he’d quickly find himself deflated.

“I kept going to small regional shows and card shops, and I could never find a PMG or a Ruby, and the Craigslist searches were very hard, and it clicked: These cards are truly hard to find, and because so many people left the hobby in the late ‘90s and things were affordable, they had largely been forgotten about,” Slayton said. “There was so much power in that. It was an undervalued asset. It’s rare, it’s scarce, it’s desired. That became my vice. I needed to find them on a daily basis.”

Soon enough, at all the local shows and on all of the message boards and all the local Craigslist pages, these iconic cards had dried up. The ones that were unearthed had largely found their forever homes. In 2015, Slayton and a cousin went to every table of the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago and asked about rare ‘90s cards. He thought he’d find one card every few tables, but halfway through the showroom, he’d found none. Two-and-a-half hours in, someone in the crowd heard him and beckoned him over. What he showed Slayton bowled him over: A 1997 SkyBox E-X2001 Essential Credentials Kobe, numbered to 73.

One had sold a month earlier for $1,000. The Kobe collector wanted $1,100.

“I had only brought 3K with me, so I didn’t do it,” he said. “I met up with him later in the day, I didn’t buy it on the spot, but I said I’m really interested in it, and if I’m not finding anything else, I’ll buy it for $975. He then showed me one of the Green PMG Kobes, and I fell over. I’m a Kobe fan. This is my grail, and it just got pulled out of some guy’s fanny pack. I couldn’t believe it.”

Slayton soon realized these grails were actually becoming more readily available and a few months later, he snagged his first one.

“Three months later, the bar is doing great, and I get a call, ‘I’m swinging through your area tomorrow,’” Slayton said. It was the Kobe collector. He was traveling from Minnesota to Chicago and he had a 1997 Metal Championship PMG Kobe out of 50. He offered it to Slayton for $3,000. “But I’m building a business here, and this was my big shot in life. This bar is my life, and I’ve got $20K to my name. I stop for five seconds and I said yup, bring it. I’ll figure it out.”

Around that same time, Michael Kadoch was reentering the hobby. His origin story was like Slayton’s and so many others: Products of the ‘90s, now grown and flush with money, looking to snag some of the impossible cards of their childhood.

He’d grown up in Brooklyn and started collecting cards in the early ‘90s when there were card stores on every other corner in New York City, but by the dawn of the new millennium, he was wrapped up in his studies. It paid off: For a decade, he was studying to become a radiologist, and when he finished his residency in 2016 and moved to California for a fellowship at Stanford, he finally had some money in his pockets.

“My first paycheck, I wanted to buy something special,” he said. “I went on eBay, and Jordan had always been my hero, and one popped up, so I bought it: The ‘86 Fleer rookie card. I got the card in hand and I was hooked right away. It started me on a path.”

He started collecting rookie cards of all the NBA greats — Magic, Bird, Wilt, Russell — and then some ‘90s inserts caught his eye, and he was enthralled. Like Slayton, he put some thought and research into it and determined that because of their true rarity — many of the top inserts and parallels of the decade came in mass-produced sets that relegated them to pipe dreams — and because of their relative attainability at the time, that segment of the hobby presented a real value proposition.

“I never really had the budget to go buy six-figure cards regularly, so I had to look for things that were overlooked that I could afford,” Kadoch said.

He broadened his collection to other sports and eventually non-sports, Marvel, oddball and obscure cards that had low overall population numbers. He began acquiring sets like Panini Prizm Gold parallels, numbered to 10, of all the top players, not just the top rookies.

“That is the crux of my collecting success, the ability to identify sets and cards that haven’t seen the mass explosion yet,” he said.

As time went on, his collection grew and grew. He never really had a goal or an end in sight. Just, if there was value there, grab it.

The biggest value he saw was with classic ’90s inserts. “Enormously high pack odds, really hard to pull, and I love it if it comes from a pack that used to cost one dollar,” he said. “I’ll tell you one that’s running right now that I love: the black 1/1 Lionel Messi sticker from this year’s Panini Sticker set. That is a one-of-one sticker that is one-in-a-billion. If I was a soccer guy with a big budget, I’d want that card. It’s not the shiniest card — no auto, no jersey — but it’s like pulling a golden ticket.”

There are golden tickets and then there are holy grails, and Kadoch had an eye on one in particular.

All Slayton promised Kadoch was an open mind. Months earlier, they’d done a deal for another one of Kadoch’s dream cards: the 1997 SkyBox Metal Football Green PMG of Brett Favre, numbered to 15, with the beautiful green-on-green color match. That one took some wheeling and dealing, too. But this was Jordan and PMG, and that combination is maybe the most enticing in the hobby. Kadoch knew it was going to take a whopper to even pique Slayton’s interest. He initially sent over a list of around 200-plus cards, all highly coveted but at relatively low price points compared to the Jordan, which had then recently sold for around $280,000.

Slayton took a look and wasn’t bowled over. Kadoch added another 50 cards. They were closer. Then another 50. They were just about there. And then one more: A Stephen Curry 2014 Panini Totally Certified Platinum Gold, numbered to 10. They had a deal.

Kadoch packed up a travel carry-on worth the price of a nice house in the Midwest, sweated his way through the TSA line and flew to Chicago to meet with Slayton, who’d rented out the back room of a restaurant to solidify the deal and celebrate.

There, spread out on a dining table, was a collection of 301 mini-grails themselves, including some of the best and rarest cards of the last three decades. Enough to make your head spin.

In a way, neither of them can really believe it. Kadoch estimates that he put maybe $100,000–$150,000 into his well-curated side of the deal. Slayton acquired the Jordan PMG for $45,000 back in 2017. “This is all possible,” Slayton stresses. “If you are savvy, if you have some knowledge and some patience, these things are possible for people who don’t need a master’s degree in something. The sky's the limit in this hobby. You don’t have to be a billionaire to jump in.”

This hobby has also changed his life. In 2022, he sold a 1997 Kobe Green PMG for $1.75 million, enough, he said, “to buy the house I’m standing in with cash.

“I always said to myself when I was buying these cards, ‘Yeah, you can buy it, you’ve got the bar,’” he continued. “The pandemic hit, [my bar] got shut down, and all of a sudden, cards exploded, and it flipped. Now I’m secure because I have cards, the bar is secure because I have the cards. I chuckle at that.”

It’s not all about the money, though. The value of these cards blows both of them away, even if both have faith in the long-term projection for rare inserts and parallels.

But as cliché as it is to say, what made this trade work and so many more like it for Slayton, are the friends he’s made along the way. The only reason he felt comfortable trading down one grail into 301 cards is because, for many of the cards he acquired, they represent a grail card to the collector who acquired them.

“There’s nothing that gets me more excited than meeting a collector who says I’m collecting a Glen Rice, a Muggsy Bogues, an Eddie Jones, guys who were great but not superstars,” Slayton said. “There is a true desire of ownership for those cards. It’s not about what this card could do in a few months or a few years. It’s, ‘I want to look at it every so often.’ There’s so much power in that nostalgia.”

When all is said and done, Slayton believes he can churn those 301 cards into more than $600,000 worth of value, all because of the network of fellow collectors he’s set up.

“IF I CAN TRADE AND CHURN THIS INTO THE $600,000 RANGE, I REALLY MADE THE RIGHT MOVE,” HE SAID. “IT FEELS LIKE LEVELING UP IN A VIDEO GAME. I MEAN, I CREATED AN LLC FOR THIS. FOR THIS ONE TRADE. IT’S CALLED, PMG PRODUCTIONS .”