It’s hard to believe, but as recent as 2 years ago it was nearly impossible to find useful sports card data within the hobby. At least data that was consumable to the masses. I started writing analytics articles back in 2015 at BreakerCulture.com. I would ingest data from eBay, pricing info from COMC/DealerNet/etc, and combine with current stats for players. The result would be a really fun Rookie Pricing Ladder…. or a Top 50 player chart.

** I wrote this article for CollectYourPlayer.com and am posting the information for you as well. ** Now days you have plenty of ways to consume sports card data. There are numerous platforms, websites, groups, etc… It’s a completely different marketplace.

But many of those platforms are narrowly focused on the price of a particular card or a specific product. What’s lost in the current approach are a few important pieces of the collecting puzzle.

Over the next few minutes I’ll explain how CollectYourPlayer is aimed at providing you a very simple but well-rounded perspective on Buying & Selling sports cards for your player!

#1: Know the Most Popular ROOKIE card!

There is no shortage of parallels, variations, brands, subsets, and inserts. For new and old collectors it can be extremely confusing trying to figure out what ROOKIE card is the right one to pursue. Obviously when it comes to collecting a player you want to be versatile and not necessarily gravitate to just the core rookies… but for folks trying to properly invest in their player, knowing the most prominent RC card is extremely important.

We built a database of EVERY active player across the major sports. We then dug through the PSA database and identified the most graded BASE ROOKIE CARD for that player.

Sometimes it might be what you expect…and follow the normal pattern across sports. But in some cases it can fluctuate between core products – ie Topps Series 1,2, & Update or Donruss / Donruss Optic / Prizm.

But the idea is simple, always know the RC card that the hobby has decided to grade most frequently because…it’ll be the card the likely ebbs and flows most closely to performance.

Here is an example of where to look on a player page. This is Ronald Acuna Jr’s player page:

You can see, Primary RC is the 2018 Topps (Update) #250. Below you’ll see that there are currently 16,533 PSA 10’s in existence… with 101 added since last update (usually a week or two). The PSA value is $195 (up $17.50 since last update).

Take that information…and extrapolate across 2,000+ active players. Now you have access to all of that, in seconds, for free!

#2: Understand Market Comparisons

With Sports Cards there is always multiple factors to weigh, each of them plays a role in the pricing of a card. But with any metric it’s always good to know the overall context. This is especially true with Sports Card values in the 2020’s. 😉

One way we like to do this is by looking at a metric we call Market Cap – and an idea that is widely accepted in the financial markets.

This metric is quite simple, we just multiple the # of PSA 10 cards by the CURRENT PSA 10 market price. This gives us a rough idea of what the market cap is for GEM MINT RC’s of that particular player.

Here is a snapshot of Collin Sexton’s market cap:

His current market cap is $178,500 … which is updated every week we update the data. In addition, it’s a LIVE ranking of the rank. Sexton is #41 in the NBA Market Cap Rank with a 55% market cap change since that last update!

This should lead to another question…. who is in the Top 10? 🙂

Well, that’s been asked and we provide a Top 10 ranking across Market Cap, PSA 10 Pop, and PSA 10 Value — for each sport!

NBA TOP 10 Basketball Card Rankings

NFL TOP 10 Football Card Rankings

MLB Top 10 Baseball Card Rankings

That data is updated weekly and should definitely be worth adding to your bookmarked pages!

#3- KNOW the Non-Sports Card Context of a Player

As we stated earlier, there is a lot of factors that go into a sports card players prices. It can be easy to get stuck inside the bubble of sports-card specific information and forget about the rest of information surrounding a player.

So, we tried to make it easy to get a quick snapshot on what’s happening with a player at any given time.

Here are some data feeds you get on each player feed – we’ll use Ja Morant as an example.

FANTASY STATS (updated weekly):

SOCIAL MEDIA STATUS + RANKING (updated quarterly):

GOOGLE NEWS FEED (updated every 5minutes!)

GOOGLE SEARCH TRENDS (updated every minute)

Wow! That’s a ton of info at your finger tips. All very accessible and constantly updated to keep you ‘in the know’ with your players.

Oh….and one more thing…. if you want to check out STATS for your player.

We put a PLAYER STATS page on every single player page. Every night those stats are updated and pulled for you to see current season Game Performances and past season averages!

4. BUY QUICKLY

Finally… all of that information is provide because it’s important for you to know BEFORE you buy or sell your particular sports card. When you are ready to do so… we’ve built the proper search strings into our eBay links to help you find the exact card you need.

You can click here:

or watch this live feed on each player page:

In some cases we may get a small affiliate % if a card is purchased through eBay. Consider that a small ‘thank you’ for all the free data. 🙂

Don’t get overwhelmed by all of the information in the Sports Card hobby…embrace it, leverage it, and enjoy it! I can assure you it’s much better than not having any data. 🙂

Ty (BreakerCulture & Bench Clear Media)