Welcome to the first edition of the column. Every week: one thing that mattered, the numbers behind it, our honest take, and what we would actually buy. No panic, no pom-poms.
The Thing
MLB dropped the full 2026 All-Star rosters Saturday night, July 4, on the FOX selection show. The Braves, Dodgers, and Phillies tied for the most selections with five each. Shohei Ohtani led all NL fan voting and skipped the runoff entirely. Junior Caminero starts at third for the AL, and Bobby Witt Jr. picked up his third career nod at shortstop. The game lands July 14 at Citizens Bank Park, with the Derby streaming July 13.
And the group chats went straight past the honorees to the snubs. Logan Webb. Ben Rice and his .922 OPS. And the loudest one: Nick Kurtz, hitting .938 OPS with 19 home runs and watching the show from his couch.
The Numbers
Five selections each for Atlanta, LA, and Philly. Three All-Star nods now for Witt. One market preview floating around claims top performers see 30 percent card bumps within 48 hours of selection night. Treat that number like a stranger's trade offer: interesting, unverified, probably optimistic.
The Take
All-Star week is the most predictable hype cycle in the hobby calendar, and predictable is the point. Everyone knows the spotlight raises prices for a week or two, which means the buying already happened. If you are reaching for a card Sunday morning because its player made the team Saturday night, you are the exit liquidity. The honest play is boring: the snub list is where the value conversation lives, because a guy hitting .938 with 19 bombs did not get worse by missing a photo op in Philadelphia.
Quick hits
Sotheby's opened bidding on two Yankee time machines. The jersey Aaron Judge wore for his 2016 debut, the one where he went 446 feet in his first at-bat, carries a 3 to 5 million dollar estimate. Jeter's jersey from The Dive is in the same sale at 500 to 700 thousand, and bidding opened July 1, twenty-two years to the day after he went face first into the stands. Auction runs through July 20. We will report the hammer.
PSA's backlog is 12 million cards and falling. The whole saga in one breath: PSA paused its cheap grading tiers on June 2 citing a 10 million card backlog, the pause announcement itself triggered a submission stampede to nearly 14 million, and PSA started publishing a public backlog tracker that showed roughly 12 million by June 30. Regular tier is now 80 dollars a card with a 40 to 50 business day wait. Credit where due: the tracker is real transparency. But if you want to know why we keep saying the grade is an opinion you pay to trust, the line for that opinion is currently twelve million cards long. We wrote the whole argument down.
A PSA 4 Ty Cobb outsold a gem mint Ohtani 1/1. Heritage's June 27 showcase closed with a 2018 Topps Transcendent Ohtani auto 1/1, graded BGS 9.5 with a 10 auto, at $231,800. Great card, great number. Then a T206 Cobb with the rare red Hindu back sold for $317,200 in PSA 4. Beat up, low grade, worth more than the flawless modern 1/1, because there are almost none of them. Population beats condition when the population is tiny. Remember that next time someone tells you the number on the slab is the whole story.
Donruss Elite came back. First standalone Elite Baseball product in over twenty years, released July 3. Two autos a box, Kaboom parallels in baseball for the first time. The nostalgia argument writes itself and the box-break math will get picked apart by the weekend. We will let the dust settle before we call it.
What We'd Actually Buy
Not the Saturday night spike. The week after it. When the All-Star bump fades, the cards of the guys who actually played well settle back toward earth, and that dip is the entry. Meanwhile, Ohtani leading all of fan voting costs nothing extra on his base cards that were printed by the truckload, and if the Judge jersey auction has you feeling Yankee nostalgia at a saner price point, the 2026 Through The Years Golden Mirror Jeter in our Vault is the same era of pinstripe worship, printed almost never, and it does not need a 5 million dollar estimate to matter.
See you next Friday. Same table, new madness.