SI's Top Five Card Sales Went From $663,500 to $6 Million in a Week — a Channel Asked If That's the Market's Peak
MidLife Sports Cards posted a video this week asking a question a lot of the hobby has been asking itself: "Is This The PEAK Of The Sports Card Market?" Sports Illustrated happened to publish two weekly top-five sales lists on either side of that question, and the two lists don't agree with each other by a wide margin.
Two Snapshots, Nine Times Apart
SI's list covering sales dated September 5-12 totaled five results: a 2023-24 Topps Sapphire UCC Lionel Messi Auto Padparadscha 1/1 at $156,000, a 1984 Star Michael Jordan #101 (PSA 7) at $147,500, a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311 (PSA Authentic/Altered) at $130,000, a 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani Orange Refractor /25 (BGS 10) at $120,000, and a 2000 Bowman Tom Brady ROY Promotion (PSA 10) at $110,000. Add those five and the total is $663,500 — SI doesn't publish a weekly sum itself; that figure is this blog's own arithmetic over numbers SI reports card by card.
SI's next list, covering September 22, ran five different results, every one of them dated September 19: a 2018 Bowman Chrome Rookie Auto Red Refractor /5 Shohei Ohtani at $2,440,000, a 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite Number Pieces Auto Michael Jordan (PSA 8/Auto 10) at $1,464,000, a 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite Emblems of Endorsements LeBron James at $732,000, a 2026 Panini Prizm World Cup Black Prizm 1/1 Lamine Yamal (PSA 10) at $702,855, and a 2025 Topps Chrome Superfractor 1/1 Shohei Ohtani (PSA 10) at $701,500. That total is $6,040,355 — again, this blog's sum, not SI's.
Line the two totals up and the second is more than nine times the first, in the space of one week.
What That Jump Actually Measures
Analysis: before that number answers anything about a "peak," it's worth looking at what produced it. All five sales in the $6 million week share a single date — September 19 — and a single house, Goldin Auctions. The $663,500 week is the opposite shape: five sales spread across an eight-day window, moving through Fanatics Weekly and eBay as well as Goldin. A top-five list built from one auction house's single sale day and a top-five list built from a week of scattered marketplace activity are not measuring the same thing, even though SI presents them in the same weekly format. A themed auction that happens to land seven-figure lots on one Saturday will produce a bigger top-five number than eight ordinary days will, regardless of whether collector demand actually moved at all.
That's the case against reading this pair of numbers as a market signal in either direction. A top-five list is five transactions, not a market — it says nothing about the thousands of sales beneath it, and a single auction house's calendar can swing the total by millions without anyone's appetite for cardboard changing at all.
Not a One-Off Question for This Channel
MidLife Sports Cards' own upload history, read from its last fifteen entries, is a weekly market-commentary format rather than pack breaks or grading reviews: a recurring "MidLife Midweek Q&A" series ran on September 2, 9 and 16, and a September 11 video was titled "Reviewing Recent Sports Card SALES In Search Of Hobby Trends." A channel that already devotes a standing weekly slot to reading sales trends asking whether the market has peaked is that channel doing what it does every week, not chasing a one-off headline.
What Would Actually Answer the Question
A real read on whether the hobby has peaked needs more than two adjacent snapshots: several consecutive weeks of top-end totals, ideally normalized for which houses ran themed sales when, plus a look at volume beneath the headline lots rather than just the five biggest. Two data points nine-to-one apart don't establish a trend — they establish that the top of the market is lumpy, which collectors who follow auction calendars already knew.
The verdict: the number swung nearly tenfold in a week, but the swing is explained by one auction house's calendar, not by nine times as much money entering the hobby. Whether MidLife Sports Cards' video reaches a different conclusion is worth watching it to find out — the title asks the right question, and these two weeks alone don't answer it.
Channel: MidLife Sports Cards
