The power play that resulted in a takeover of the trading card licenses of Major League Baseball, the NFL and NBA was born in a meeting that took place for years ago in New York.
That’s when the men in charge of the MLB and NFL Players Associations met to discuss combining forces for the benefit of athletes in both leagues. The result was an organization called One Team Partners, which is focused on enhancing the licensing opportunities and revenue for players. Trading cards were one area in which both saw the potential to make a better deal by thinking bigger.
It all came together with this summer’s blockbuster news that Fanatics had struck deals with the players unions, MLB and the NBA to create a trading card company in which the players and leagues had a stake.
“We want to dictate how we’re playing in that ecosystem, as opposed to someone else dictating how we’re going to play in the ecosystem,” NFLPA President DeMaurice Smith told The Wall Street Journal for this story on how the trading card upheaval was born. “That doesn’t exist without all of us coming together to do it. The world that we were always stuck with was one party dictating to us.”
Endeavor Group Holdings, one of the new investors in Fanatics Trading Cards, is partnering with eBay to sell items around a series of live events.
Business media reports say Endeavor, which owns UFC, will be working with Collectable’s Mint Collective event in Las Vegas in January. That event is being held at UFC facilities in Las Vegas.
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is among the stakeholders in Endeavor.
Former New York Yankee Joe Pepitone has dropped his lawsuit against the Baseball Hall of Fame over Mickey Mantle’s 500th home run bat.
Mantle borrowed one of Pepitone’s Louisville Slugger bats to hit the milestone homer on May 14, 1967.
Pepitone had claimed he’d loaned the valuable piece of history to the Hall many years ago with the option to have it returned to him, while the Hall claimed the bat belonged to the Yankees, who simply donated it with no strings attached back in 1967.
Should it have reached the market, auction company officials believe it would have sold for anywhere from $750,000-$2 million.
The jersey worn by Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert last Sunday is up for sale. The white gamer is being sold by NFL Auctions as part of the Crucial Catch campaign that raises money to fight cancer through early detection and risk reduction.
Bidding had $20,000 by Tuesday, with the auction slated to run through Monday, October 18.
Herbert went 26-of-43 for a career-high 398 yards in Sunday’s 47-42 win over the Cleveland Browns. He led his third game-winning drive of the season and over his last three starts, has 12 total touchdowns and no turnovers.
Just Rip It has had some success opening 1958 Topps Football cello packs over the last couple of years. One pack they broke open on a live show in 2019 included a Jim Brown rookie card. Another opened the next night had a Brown and a second year Johnny Unitas.
On Monday night, they opened three more cello packs. Unfortunately, the centering wasn’t very good on many of the cards that emerged, but the first pack did yield a sharp-cornered second year Bart Starr card.
Spots were sold online ahead of the break with buyers sharing in any proceeds of the cards that were pulled.
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