PSA has spent a lot of time grading, encapsulating and shipping Shohei Ohtani cards since the end of the 2024 Major League Baseball season.
Between last November, after the LA Dodgers captured the World Series, and the end of last month, the company graded 87,300 Ohtani cards—or on average, about 727 per day and 30 of them every hour, every day since the day after Halloween.
Ohtani easily topped the company’s list of baseball cards that were graded more than any other during the MLB offseason.
Paul Skenes was number two with PSA working through about 50,600 submissions of cards featuring the National League’s Rookie of the Year. No other player’s cards were graded even half as often as Ohtani, whose rookie cards arrived in 2018 products.
Only Ken Griffey Jr. is ahead of Ohtani on PSA’s all-time list of most graded baseball cards and over three times as many Ohtani cards as Griffey were graded during the three-month period.
Three of the top 20 most graded players on PSA’s offseason list are from Japan. Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga: Newcomer Roki Sasaki doesn’t have many cards yet, but almost made the list with the 4,800 mostly Topps NOW submissions putting him at number 21.
Hitting a walk-off World Series homer and winning the MVP can have an impact, too. PSA says there was a 220% increase in the number of Freddie Freeman cards graded from November to January.
Here’s the full top 20 list of players whose cards were graded most often between the end of the 2024 MLB season and the end of February:
- Shohei Ohtani: 87.3k cards graded
- Paul Skenes: 50.6k
- Elly De La Cruz: 30.6k
- Aaron Judge: 21.5k
- Jackson Holliday: 20.4k
- Jackson Merrill: 17.8k
- Jackson Chourio: 16.6k
- Bobby Witt Jr.: 15.5k
- Yoshinobu Yamamoto: 12.2k
- Jasson Dominguez: 10.7k
- Wyatt Langford: 9.7k
- Juan Soto: 7.6k
- Gunnar Henderson: 7.6k
- Junior Caminero: 7k
- Mike Trout: 6.9k
- Freddie Freeman: 5.2k
- Ronald Acuna Jr.: 5k
- Bryce Harper: 5k
- Julio Rodriguez: 4.9k
- Shota Imanaga: 4.8k
Michael Jordan tops the list of most graded players for all sports, according to Gem Rate, which says PSA, SGC, Beckett and CSG have seen 1,634,231 of his cards since 1992. Griffey is second at 764,678, followed by LeBron James at 684,565, Ohtani at 626,495 and Kobe Bryant at 617,199.
