I was talking with my buddy and one of my favorite Facebook card movers, Ian Mcwhorter, the other night. He brought up a good point, and something we seem to talk about and then just glaze right over: Ohtani and Wemby's print numbers are going to dramatically affect collecting down the road.
Two sports. Two card companies. One shared number problem the hobby keeps pretending is somebody else's, when it's actually everybody's, right now.
The Print Numbers
Shohei Ohtani already has over 24,000 different baseball cards in existence, a figure Trading Card Database expects to reach six figures before his career ends. Sports Card Investor alone is actively tracking over 14,000 of his cards for pricing purposes, and that's just the ones popular enough to bother pricing. That's not counting parallels and inserts separately, that's total distinct cards.
Victor Wembanyama's rookie class is smaller in card count but denser in population. Sports Card Investor is tracking nearly 8,000 of his cards already, just two seasons in. His base 2023-24 Panini Prizm rookie alone has been submitted to grading over 45,000 times. Add the Monopoly insert at another 17,000 submissions, and two cards from one rookie season are outpacing the print run of entire vintage sets combined.
The Grading Numbers
This is where it gets ugly.
Ohtani's flagship 2018 Topps Chrome rookie has 15,843 copies sitting in a PSA 10 holder right now, out of an 87.2 percent gem rate submission pool. His 2018 Topps Update rookie isn't far behind at over 11,000 PSA 10s.
Wemby's numbers are worse. Of the 45,025 Prizm base cards submitted, over 24,000 came back gem mint. That single card passed Luka Doncic's 2018 Prizm rookie, the previous record holder for most-graded modern basketball card at 39,357 total submissions, in under two years. The Monopoly insert adds another 10,000-plus gem copies on top of that.
PSA processed 2.17 million cards in a single month earlier this year. That's not a snapshot, that's the run rate. Every playoff series, every MVP case, every milestone triggers another wave of submissions, and every wave adds permanently to a population count that never shrinks.
What This Does to the Hobby Long Term
The flagship base card stops being a collectible and becomes a unit of exchange. When 15,000 to 40,000-plus PSA 10s of one card exist and the number is still climbing every quarter, nobody's holding a rare object. They're holding a liquid, easily replaced token that happens to have a superstar's face on it.
Scarcity gets pushed entirely onto low-pop parallels and inserts. Wemby's Red Prizm, numbered to just 299 copies, only has 163 PSA 10s to date, a fraction of the base card's population.
Twenty years from now, the flagship rookie of a hall-of-fame caliber player could be the least valuable "important" card in the hobby, purely on population math. The closest precedent isn't a scandal or a bust, it's simple oversupply: late-80s and early-90s base cards printed in the millions still sit in dollar boxes today regardless of who's on the front. A 100,000-plus PSA 10 population Ohtani rookie doesn't need the player to decline for the card to stagnate. The math does that on its own.
Nobody upstream in that chain is protecting the collector holding the card at the top of the population report in 2046.
The Bottom Line
The player narratives are real. Talent doesn't cap a print run, and it doesn't cap a grading submission queue. Right now the hobby is stacking historically unprecedented population counts on top of two of its biggest stars, and the only real question left is whether collectors figure that out before or after the pop reports do the talking for them.