All in the cards

Once again, we are on holiday autopilot, which means that barring the unexpected, it should be a very quiet week. Although, Munnetaka Murakami signed with the Chicago White Sox on a prove-it, two-year, $34 million deal on Sunday.

This essay consists of a bunch of card-and-ball-related stubs that would be too short to merit their own essay.

The baseball card market goes Ohtani mad

If there is one thing I have learned while covering Shohei Ohtani over the past two years, it is that anything with his name on it at auction tends to get stupidly expensive, stupidly quickly.

On Thursday, December 19th, an Ohtani Topps Gold Logoman autograph card was sold for $3 million (including fees), shattering the previous record for an auctioned Ohtani card of $1.067 million (including fees) set in 2024. The 2025 card is a one-of-a-kind item, including a signature and the gold MVP patch from Ohtani’s jersey on April 29 against the Marlins, when he homered for the first time since becoming a father.

Per Bryan Horowitz of MLB.com, Minneapolis residents Pete Anderson and his twin sons Colton and Henry pulled the card and opted to put it up for auction. Considering what the previous record card sold for, it is life-changing money.

For contrast and context, on November 21, New York Knicks player Karl Anthony Towns pulled a Logoman one-of-one card featuring Yoshinobu Yamamoto, which sold for $72,000 at auction after the World Series.

Seeing how players like Will Klein and others are embracing collecting and hunting baseball cards, the situation proves that time is a flat circle in this respect, as everything cycles from boom to bust.

Final Dodgers One Piece PSA

Back in July, the Dodgers collaborated with the hit anime One Piece and gave away a commemorative straw hat and a trading card from the One Piece Trading Card Game.

Per Brooks Peck of The Athletic, one such card from that sold for $14,999.99 on eBay. Per The Athletic, the card has been graded more than 7,000 times by industry leader Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), with more than 6,000 examples earning the top PSA 10 grade, which were selling for more than $2,000 in November, while ungraded One Piece Dodger promo cards were selling for as much as $1,000.

Mr. Peck also provided information on how this card sold for a record $14,999.99. The card was graded through Beckett Grading Services (BGS) instead of PSA and earned a BGS 10 Pristine Black Label, which collectors consider the most difficult grade to attain and carries a premium value. For the approximate 1,500 examples of the Dodgers One Piece card graded by Beckett at the time of the article, only 50 have achieved Black Label status.

This story is not to say that the promo you might have can suddenly be sold for $14,999.99. First, there is a bubble in collective card games like One Piece and the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Second, if the card is not sealed in pristine condition, the value drops considerably.

So, dear reader, if you still have a sealed promo card from that night, you might want to keep track of it or sell it before the trading card bubble bursts.

Nachos or a one-in-a-lifetime-ball

Larry Holder of The Athletic gave a fun account of an interesting problem: how does one authenticate a home run ball that literally left the stadium? On October 17, Ohtani had the best playoff game in history as the Dodgers clinched a World Series berth by single-handedly sweeping the Milwaukee Brewers out of Game 4 of the National League Championship Series.

His second home run literally left Dodger Stadium, and the Dodgers put a plaque commemorating the feat in the days following the game.

Fan Carlo Mendoza was eating nachos in the center field plaza and saw the ball land near him. Per Mr. Holder, Mr. Mendoza had a choice:

Enjoy some delicious Dodger Stadium nachos or launch into the bushes in the center-field concourse for a Shohei Ohtani home run ball.

Safe to say Mendoza made the right decision by ditching the nachos to snag a piece of arguably the greatest single-game performance in MLB history during the Los Angeles Dodgers’ win over the Milwaukee Brewers. And that call could end up being a seven-figure, life-changing decision.

Mendoza chose the ball. Unlike other famous Ohtani home run balls (see: first 50/50 home run ball scrum in Miami, Florida), Mendoza scraped up his leg but otherwise got the ball with little incident.

Since the ball left the stadium, the authenticators at Dodger Stadium would not authenticate the ball. Mendoza had the quick thinking to take photos of himself with the ball and his MLB Passport. Moreover, Dodger Stadium staff did stamp the second Ohtani home run ball with the date, and the auction house had Mendoza sign a notarized affidavit and take a polygraph, which he passed, to verify the ball’s authenticity.

The ball ultimately sold for $270,000 at auction.