The same LeBron rookie sold for $2,750 and $7,300

Three copies of the 2003-04 Topps Chrome #111 closed Saturday at $7,300, $3,250 and $2,750 — separated only by what the label said.

Three copies of the 2003-04 Topps Chrome #111 LeBron James rookie sold on eBay on Saturday. A BGS 9.5 took $7,300.00, a PSA 8 took $3,250.00, and an ungraded copy took $2,750.00 — three confirmed paid prices, one card, one day.

Why it matters

Most prices a collector reads are medians pulled from 90-day pools that quietly mix grades, parallels and reprints together. This needs no pool: the same card, twice, in one session. If you hold a raw Chrome #111, Saturday priced your decision at $4,550.00 — the widest dollar gap of the 6 same-card pairs we tracked, and the number to weigh against submission cost.

By the numbers

• $7,300.00 — the BGS 9.5, sold at a fixed price with zero bids.
• $3,250.00 — the PSA 8, bid up by 16 buyers in an open auction.
• $2,750.00 — the ungraded copy, which drew 25 bidders, more than either slab. The highest number of the three was the only one no bidder ever tested.

Between the lines

All 6 pairs are a graded copy against an ungraded one. Saturday produced exactly one case of the same card selling twice in the same grade — two 2003-04 Topps Draft Pick #221 LeBron rookies, both PSA 9, at $2,060.00 and $1,775.00. Both were contested auctions, and they still landed a 1.16x spread apart. Where the label matched, the market agreed to within 16%. Where it did not, the same cardboard ranged from 2.2x to 8.46x.

Reality check

Two of those gaps flatter the table. The widest multiple — 8.46x on the Fleer Tradition #261, a PSA 10 at $2,750.00 against $325.00 ungraded — drew no bidding on the cheap side, so its low end is an asking price somebody met, not a contest. And the 1987-88 Fleer #59 Jordan pair is the only one where both copies were genuinely contested, but the ungraded seller disclosed a crease. Part of that $682.21 is damage, not grade.

What's next

RazMania runs this comparison every morning at 11 a.m. ET. Some days it will publish nothing, and that is the design: no card trading twice at a defensible gap means no article. Saturday’s board was 29 confirmed-paid Jordan sales and 52 LeBron sales, at medians of $406.00 and $622.25. Six comparisons survived. We covered this same Chrome #111 rookie on August 12.

How we track this

RazMania compares completed eBay sales of the same card that closed on the same day. Two sales are treated as the same card only when the player, year, set, card number, parallel or photo variation, print-run serial, autograph status and altered status all match — so a Refractor is never compared against a base card. Best Offer sales are excluded entirely, because eBay publishes the seller’s asking price on those and never the settled figure; every price here is a confirmed paid price. Multi-card lots, reprints and customs are filtered out. We quote no comparable-sales median and no 90-day pool — both prices in every comparison closed on the same day. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.