Released: February 24, 2026 | Duration: 13:39
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About This Episode
Grading has a structural mispricing that represents one of the most compelling arbitrage opportunities in the sports card market. This episode breaks down the population data, valuation multiples, and market mechanics that explain why.
The key analysis centers on the PSA 10 to BGS 10 Pristine population gap using the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. Star Rookie as the case study. The 39x rarity differential between PSA 10 and BGS 10 Pristine only translates to a 1.79x price premium — and this episode argues that pricing is broken. It also covers how the junk parallel era created supply fatigue in modern cards, why Pokémon collectors are driving Beckett population growth, the impact of 1,000 new millionaires per day on collectibles liquidity pools, and the comparison of PSA 9 to PSA 10 multiples versus PSA 10 to BGS 10 multiples.
Population data discussed: the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. Star Rookie has 4,357 PSA 10s versus only 113 BGS 10 Pristines. The PSA 9 to PSA 10 population ratio is 7.85x with a value multiplier of 12.37x. The PSA 10 to BGS 10 Pristine population ratio is 39x — but the value multiplier is only 1.79x. That is the mispricing.
This analysis builds on previous Slabnomics research showing how grading populations exploded from 5 million PSA 10s (1991–2019) to 36 million total PSA 10s through 2025. The same supply dynamics that killed PSA 9 values in ultra-modern parallels are now creating opportunity in Beckett Pristine grades as the market bifurcates between institutional collectors and retail buyers.
Topics Covered
- The junk wax era and how manufacturer overprinting created the first market super cycle
- How Topps Chrome (1996) and Prizm (2012) revolutionized the hobby through refractor technology
- The junk parallel era: why modern parallel expansion mirrors junk wax overprinting
- PSA grading explosion: 5M PSA 10s (1991–2019) to 36M PSA 10s through 2025
- Why PSA’s parent company acquired Beckett — and what Pokémon has to do with it
- Market bifurcation: how high-end and low-end cards decoupled in mid-2021
- The BGS 10 Pristine misvaluation thesis
- Case study: 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. Star Rookie population analysis
- PSA 9 to PSA 10 multipliers: 7.85x population ratio vs 12.37x value ratio
- PSA 10 to BGS 10 Pristine: 39x rarity differential vs only 1.79x price premium
- Why AI-driven wealth creation will compress this mispricing
- The era of hyper-rarity and scarcity
Full Transcript
The Most Important Episode Yet
I’m sure clicking on this link, you saw how short this podcast is. Let me assure you — I have put forth hundreds of thousands of words into podcasts for you guys. I have put content out there left, right, and center. I can assure you this is the most important podcast I have yet recorded. It doesn’t need a lot of fluff. It doesn’t need me to go on a bunch of rants. I am giving you something that is so incredibly powerful that I thought about not coming on here and talking about it at all.
That only happened one other time, and that’s when I talked about the PSA 9 Is Dead concept. Now, that post got 1.1 million views to this point. I believe this is a more powerful concept.
Setting the Stage
Now, the point I’m going to make has to do with sports cards, and it ties in the history that I’ve gone through in all of my podcasts, as well as the content that I built over on my Slabnomics Instagram, where I speak about what the grading environment has looked like and how the market has been different in 2020 and 2021 versus 2025.
Bolted onto that, I’ve been talking a lot about Pokémon because I’ve been learning a lot about markets through Pokémon. And why bring up Pokémon, you ask? Well, I found it to actually be the most stable market over the past five years, even compared to high-end sports cards.
So in order to set the stage about what I’m going to talk about shortly, I need to tell you a little bit about the history of cards for a second.
A Brief History of Cards
The first true market super cycle took place during the junk wax era. Topps, Upper Deck, and Fleer noticed they could start printing these cards to oblivion because all of a sudden there was a craze for sports cards. Before, these had just been things people put into their bike spokes or things that they traded with each other and had fun with.
Now, Gen X was coming into money and they wanted to have these assets that they wanted so much as a kid. So prices started booming and the manufacturers responded in kind by printing to the absolute moon.
Looking back at the mid-eighties to early nineties, we can all say — wow, what a shame it was. There were some amazing athletes that fell into this time, and unfortunately they were victims of this junk wax era. More about that in a second.
The Birth of the Refractor
The manufacturers noticed that things were going sideways, so of course they decided to use technology and innovate, and thus the refractors were born.
The demand settled down a little bit, print runs came down, but this new evolution of the refractor and the cool inserts that they started making really gave new life to the hobby that had suffered from this lack of innovation throughout the mid-80s into the early 90s.
And of course, important to note that 1999 is when Pokémon hit the US and it went absolutely bonkers. I remember being a nine-year-old kid — and let me tell you, the Pokémon craze was everywhere.
The game-changing success of the 1993 Topps Finest baseball series with their chromium finish was built upon and catapulted to the moon by the 1996 inception of Topps Chrome Baseball and Topps Chrome Basketball.
In an age where everyone thinks of Prizm as the GOAT, Topps Chrome is the true GOAT. And I believe with Fanatics taking over the license, that is going to be re-established. You better bet Michael Rubin believes that too.
With the wild success of 1996 Topps Chrome, it was followed up in 2002 — the new millennium — by the expansion of the gold parallel. This was in Series One of Topps Chrome Baseball. Series Two added the black refractor. And from then on, they added refractors here, there, and everywhere as they expanded the demand.
Now Panini, which had always operated more in the sticker game and the low end, finally got the license away from Topps and they came up huge with their Prizm brand debuting in 2012 for football, baseball, and basketball. Following the blueprint that Topps had before them.
However, ever since 2012, there has been the expansion of new sub-brands under Panini, new sub-brands under Topps Chrome, as well as other brands that have come either under the fold of those by acquisition, or those that have tried to play in the same sandbox without any licensing — like Leaf.
The Junk Parallel Era
Now I can hear you start snoring over there, so I promise the history lesson is over. But we’ve come now to the junk parallel era.
Topps in the 80s and 90s realized that they could print to the moon, and then they had to innovate in order to freshen things up and get demand back where it needed to be. The same thing happened when we got into the Prizm and the Topps Chrome parallels of the 2000s into the 2010s and into modernity. Now we have so many parallels that it’s mind-boggling to try and figure out what they are, and almost absurd to try and consider collecting them all.
Shout out Pokémon on that one.
The Grading Explosion
Back to the present day and what I’ve been doing with Slabnomics.
What happened before this grading explosion that we had during COVID? What happened after we had this market demand?
We had such an incredible demand for grading in 2020 and 2021 that PSA actually had to shut their doors — highlighted in my PSA 9 Is Dead carousel that got the 1.1 million views.
The population exploded from 5 million PSA 10s that had been graded all the way from 1991 through 2019, to tacking on 31 million PSA 10s from 2020 through 2025. That’s six times the supply added in six years versus the prior 28-year time period.
I want to make sure you’re following me at Slabnomics. That’s where I put out all this content where I can deep dive into this stuff, because I know listening to it can be a little bit much. Also subscribe to my free newsletter, which you can do via my profile at Slabnomics.
Okay, so the supply went crazy, right? And this new mountain of supply basically killed the PSA 9 because there was so much supply that — why does anyone need to go get a PSA 9 when a PSA 10 is pretty easy to come by? So that being the case for most of the ultra-modern parallels that we have, except for the really rare ones.
Three Converging Forces
I started going down another rabbit hole when I started looking at Pokémon and Beckett, because Collectors — the PSA parent company — actually bought Beckett recently.
Now, I don’t know if you felt this way, but during the past couple of years, I’ve been feeling like Beckett has been getting worse and worse. So when Collectors went and bought them, it really made me raise my eyebrows. I wanted to go investigate why they would do that. What I found opened my eyes and changed how I looked at the entire market.
Now the last piece of content that I bring up that I need you to know about was the State of the Hobby that I did at the end of the year. In it, I looked at 2025 and how it was different from COVID times. What I found was all of the COVID demand bubbled up from the bottom — and it makes sense, right? All of us got a few extra bucks in our pocket. We had not much to do and we were looking for ways to make a little bit more money when everything was falling around us.
So all of those low-end cards went bananas — like base cards of Luka Dončić or Erling Haaland if you’re into soccer.
So 2025 was a great year for sports cards. Must have done the same, right? What I found was that low end and high end were now operating in 2025 as totally different markets. And in fact, they decoupled in their price movements around mid-2021.
So in 2025, when you’re hearing the card market’s going bananas and you look at your base cards being like, why aren’t they moving? That’s because it’s all the Kevin O’Learys buying these investable asset cards for alternative investments.
So we’re in the junk parallel era where we’re flooded with too many parallels. Beckett was almost run into the ground and got rescued by PSA. Why did they want them? Tell you in a second.
And one little clue for that — the reason that Beckett was actually getting saved, that PSA I’m sure saw, is because of Pokémon. Pokémon started going nuts in Beckett registries.
So then the third thing: we have this bifurcation of the market where high end is operating differently from low end. You put all three of those factors together — junk parallel era causing fatigue, Beckett now coming into prevalence because of Pokémon for some reason, and the high end coming into its own as an alternate asset class with people looking for the long term — and that gives you what I’m about to say.
The BGS 10 Mispricing
Now, I’m not one to look you in the eye and tell you that I know what is about to happen. I have avoided doing that every single episode of Slabnomics. But what I’m going to tell you, I firmly believe in.
There is a misvaluation in BGS 10 and BGS 10 Black Label. This has come to my attention through Pokémon, because I understood the mechanism that PSA 10s in Pokémon are actually pretty dead themselves for the long term. There’s 44,000 PSA 10s in some of those very popular Pokémon cards that go for $2,000.
This new era that we are about to walk into is the era of hyper-rarity and scarcity. And that mechanism is going to be through the BGS 10 Pristine and BGS 10 Black Label.
Now if you go look at the prices for Black Label and Pristine cards, even of huge iconic cards, you’re not going to see the kind of multiples that you would expect due to the rarity. And I’m going to tell you why that is and why that’s about to change.
The Population Math
The price multiple of a PSA 9 to a PSA 10 is generally accepted to be about 2.5x. A card that’s a PSA 9 at $100, then your PSA 10 is probably about $250. That’s generally accepted — it’s a rule of thumb — because most of the time the population mirrors that roughly.
Now I know what you’re thinking: that’s crazy to say with all of these different cards. But that’s pretty much the baseline of going from 9 to 10 in most cards that have real demand.
Now, what you’re going to find, though, is that older cards and vintage sets — say the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson, say the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. — these are going to have much higher multiples going from 9 to 10, meaning 10s are much more rare because the gem rate is a lot harder.
Case in point: the 1989 Upper Deck Star Rookie Ken Griffey Jr. The PSA 9 to PSA 10 population ratio is about 7.85x. So there’s almost eight times as many PSA 9s as there are 10s. It stands to reason with supply and demand, and how iconic that card is, that the value multiplier from PSA 9 to PSA 10 is not just going to be 2.5x — because it’s so much rarer to have that 10 than the 9.
Now remember, I said almost 8x on that multiple for the population from 9 to 10. Well, the value multiplier is actually a little bit over 12 — 12.37x. And I found in searching through thousands of cards — I swear, these tired eyes and these forehead wrinkles — the more iconic a card, the more that 10 matters. So that multiplier from 9 to 10 becomes more and more exacerbated. That’s why you have an 8-to-12 multiple difference between population and actual valuation.
Why This Won’t Last
Now I’m going to tell you one more thing and then I’m about to end this podcast. I’m going to leave you with something truly tremendous.
Remember what I just said about the PSA 9 to 10 multiple in this very card — it’s about 8x on the population and 12x on the valuation. Do you know what the PSA 10 to BGS 10 population multiple is? Do you know how many more PSA 10s there are than BGS 10 Pristines?
There are almost 39 times more PSA 10s than BGS 10 Pristines.
While there are 4,357 PSA 10s, there are only 113 BGS 10 Pristines. Now you would think — such an iconic card, we just saw the multiple from 9 to 10 on the PSA side, how because of that rarity and the iconic class of this card, it was actually worth more to go from the 9 to the 10 because of how famous the card is.
Shouldn’t that be the case when going from a PSA 10 to a BGS 10 Pristine, where it’s only half a grade off of a perfect card?
But with the BGS 10 Pristine being 39 times more rare than a PSA 10, its valuation comparatively is only 1.79 times a PSA 10. 39 times more rare, less than twice as expensive.
This is broken. And with a thousand millionaires being made every single day because of AI, this will not be broken for long. Because the only reason that this is broken is because the population of the market that wants and can pay for those BGS 10 Pristines has been too small.
Not enough people make up that liquidity pool who are going to pay for those 113 Pristines that people want a lot more money for than the PSA 10s.
I mean, think of it — there are already over 4,300 people holding a PSA 10 of that Ken Griffey Jr.
But when this is becoming more and more an alternate asset class that people are tucking away as a long-term investment, and a thousand millionaires are being minted per day, you can bet that this is not going to last for much longer.
Closing
So before signing off — if you thought this was important and you want to talk about it with your friends, make sure to share this episode with people that will get this.
Secondly, if you want more information like this, I’m about to go live with a resource hub that is going to give you things like this broken down by what cards to actually look for, as well as my own portfolio of what I’ve been buying. If you sign up for that tier of access, you’re also going to be getting an extra podcast that I put out only for those tier subscribers.
Some more information coming on that soon. Be sure to follow me at Slabnomics.
And as always, keep building — and I’ll talk to you later.