Courtesy of Fanaticscollect.com (baseball card); Shutterstock.com (all other images)

Million Dollar Find

Last year, an 11-year-old boy from Los Angeles, California, got the ultimate Christmas gift: a baseball card worth more than $1 million! It was a super-rare card of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes. The boy’s family sold it at an auction in March. 

For weeks, the young baseball fan had begged his parents for a box of 24 packs of cards from the 2024 Topps Chrome Update Series. On Christmas morning, he couldn’t wait to rip open each pack. In one of them, he found a card that read “Congratulations!” It had instructions for trading it in for the Skenes card that countless collectors had hoped to find.

“Me, my brother, and my dad were like OMG!!!!” the boy wrote in his journal.* “I started bouncing all over the place.” 

Courtesy of Fanaticscollect.com

The condition of trading cards affects their value. The Paul Skenes card is in perfect condition.

One of a Kind

To understand why the card is worth so much, it helps to know about supply and demand (see below). Supply is the amount of an item that is available. The Skenes card is one of a kind. It’s autographed by the player and includes a patch from the uniform he wore in his first major league game. 

Demand refers to how much people want an item. It was extremely high for the Skenes card and not just because there’s only one. Skenes is one of baseball’s top young stars, making the card even more valued by collectors.

The boy and his family decided to sell it at an auction. Bidders drove the price higher and higher, until the card finally sold for a whopping $1.1 million! The family plans to use some of the money to pay for their sons’ educations. 

“Pulling the card is a dream come true,” the boy wrote. 

*To protect the boy’s privacy, his family did not release his name. 

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