Card of the Day: 1988 Fleer #20 Scottie Pippen RC
273. That is how many PSA 10s exist of the 1988 Fleer Scottie Pippen rookie, out of 16,129 graded — a gem rate of 1.69%. After yesterday's 1969 Reggie Jackson, where the count was one in 11,749 (CASE #0240), 273 sounds like abundance. It isn't. It is roughly one in sixty.
The card above is one of them: cert 47114181, a GEM-MT 10.
The Best Rookie Class Fleer Ever Printed
PSA's own set profile calls this 132-card issue "studded with second-year cards of many top players," but the rookies are the reason anyone still opens it: Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Reggie Miller and John Stockton all debut here. Four Hall of Famers in one 132-card set, Fleer's second annual basketball release after a gap of more than two decades.
Pippen is #20, in a red Bulls #33 jersey, rising with his arm extended. His name runs across the top in black capitals with the Fleer logo beside it, BULLS sits in a black bar along the bottom next to FORWARD, and the photo is framed in red and black inside a cream-white border.
PSA Population Report
| PSA Grade | Population | Value |
|---|---|---|
| PSA 10 | 273 | $2,775 |
| PSA 9 | 4,153 | $200 |
| PSA 8 | 7,079 | $55 |
| Total Graded (All Grades) | 16,129 | — |
* Population data as of August 12, 2026.
Not Actually Junk Wax
The instinct with any late-'80s card is to assume it was printed into oblivion. PSA pushes back on that directly in its set profile: print runs for 1988 Fleer "appear to be more limited than the 1990-and-after releases, which adds to the popularity of the set."
The population ladder backs that up. Look at the shape of it — 7,079 copies at PSA 8 against 4,153 at 9 and only 273 at 10. Submissions are concentrated in the middle, not the top. In a genuinely overproduced issue with pristine survivors sitting in cases, you would expect the 9s and 10s to be far deeper than this.
That cream-white border is doing the work. It shows every handling mark, and the red-and-black inner frame makes any centering drift obvious — the frame line acts as a ruler against the border. Cards like this fail at 10 on a millimeter.
Where the Value Sits
The step from PSA 9 to PSA 10 is $200 to $2,775 — nearly fourteen times, for one grade point. The PSA 8 at $55 is essentially a common.
That is the modern-vintage pattern in its purest form: supply is plentiful until you demand perfection, and then it collapses. Compare it to the Reggie Jackson from yesterday, where the PSA 9 carried a $70,500 Price Guide value because the grade above it effectively does not trade. Here, the 10 is genuinely obtainable — 273 of them — and priced like a card you could actually own rather than a museum piece.
Verdict: misdemeanor. A four-Hall-of-Famer rookie set that everyone assumes was overprinted, a gem rate under two percent, and a fourteen-fold jump for the last grade point. The crime is how many people still call this junk wax.
