Twenty-nine lots we already had a page for
A quick word on who we are, for anyone who has just wandered in, and then a coincidence that is genuinely fun.
The Heirloom Index follows thirty-nine cards. Not the hobby — thirty-nine. Ruth, Mantle, Mays, Jordan, Brady, and a short list of others: the cards that turn up in wills, and that people who have never opened a pack have still heard of. Twenty-five of those we single out. We chose them years ago, we publish what each one is asking on the open market every single day, and here is the part that actually matters — we do not swap one out because something else had a good month. A list you revise is not a list. It is a mood.
Which is what made the third week of August such a pleasure to watch.
Heritage Auctions ran its Summer Platinum Night sale from August 21 to 23. We went through the results afterward, held them up against our own thirty-nine, and twenty-nine lots came back. Thirteen different cards. $6,703,578 between them, every figure including the house’s 22% buyer’s premium. Nobody at Heritage has seen our list. Nobody here saw their catalog.
Now, the overlap itself is not a miracle. Ask two people to name the cards that matter most in postwar American sport and they will name mostly the same ones, because the set of objects carrying both a famous name and a deep, liquid, well-documented market is small. That is fine. The interesting part is not that it happened — it is what twenty-nine results across thirteen cards will show you that a single headline sale never can.
Two Bill Russells, twelve thousand apart
Two lots in this sale were, on paper, the same object: a 1957 Topps Bill Russell rookie, graded PSA 8. They crossed the block about a day apart. One brought $146,400. The other brought $158,600.
The difference you can actually see is a small sticker.
If you have not met them yet: Mike Baker Authenticated, or MBA, is a young outfit doing something slightly cheeky — it grades the graders. You send in a card that PSA or BGS or SGC has already numbered, and MBA gives a second opinion on how that particular copy presents: centering, print, the way it sits and looks behind the plastic. A silver sticker puts a card in roughly the top fifteen percent of everything sharing its grade. A gold one is scarcer still. It is not a regrade, it overrules nobody, and it changes nothing about the number on the flip. It is a note in the margin that says: of the thirty-odd cards wearing this grade, this is one of the handsome ones.
We are not going to tell you that sticker is worth $12,200. Two lots are two lots, and a hundred things sit between them that neither the grade nor the sticker records — the room, the hour, who happened to be awake. What the pair does show, cleanly and without any help from us, is that the number on the flip was not a complete description of either card. Four of the strongest lots in this catalog wore an MBA sticker: the two best Mantles, the 1969 Topps Kareem at PSA 9, and this Russell. That is a thing that happened. It is not a forecast, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you it is.
Eight 1986 Fleer Jordans, one catalog
The 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan came up eight separate times in this sale, which is a small marvel of supply and also a rather good natural experiment.
At PSA 10, one brought $414,800. At BGS 8, in the same catalog, another brought $12,810. Stacked in between: a BGS 9.5 at $64,050, a PSA 8.5 at $45,140, three PSA 8s at $18,526, $18,300 and $18,300, and a PSA 7 at $14,640.
Read that middle cluster again. Three of them are the same card at the same grade, sold in the same room, within $226 of each other. Two hundred and twenty-six dollars, on eighteen-thousand-dollar cards. That is not a market being indecisive. That is a market that has thoroughly made up its mind — and then, four rungs up, the same card behaves like a painting, because at the top there is nothing left to average against.
Which is the whole reason we pin one grade per card and leave it pinned. Quote a card at whatever grade happens to be listed on a given Tuesday and you are not reporting on the card. You are reporting on which copy was for sale on Tuesday. The eight Jordans are one object, eight times, thirty-two times apart.
What a catalog and a list have in common
An auction catalog and a curated list are both acts of selection, and they answer to completely different masters. A catalog is built from whatever people were willing to part with this summer — estates, divorces, second thoughts, a good offer at the right moment. A list is built from what somebody believes will still be worth explaining in fifty years. There is no earthly reason those two should agree.
They agreed on thirteen cards, which is most of what either one holds. We take that as a mild bit of reassurance and nothing grander — the consignors were not voting, and neither were we. But it is a good week to say plainly what this thing is for. It will never tell you what a card is going to do next. It tells you what a card is, what has been paid for it in public, and by whom — and it holds the question still, so that the answers stay worth comparing.
Twenty-nine of those answers turned up in three days in August. They are all in the record now, and they will still be there in ten years, which is rather the point.