Same Jordan Card, Same Day, $2,460 Apart

A PSA 9 1992-93 Stadium Club Beam Team Jordan took $3,450.00 on Tuesday. An ungraded copy of the same card took $990.00.

A PSA 9 1992-93 Topps Stadium Club Beam Team Michael Jordan sold for $3,450.00 on Tuesday. An ungraded copy of the same card, closing the same day, took $990.00 — a 3.48x gap on $2,460.00.

Why it matters

Most of that gap is the grade itself, and it should not be read as a mispricing. What makes Tuesday worth a column is how tightly the graded side is pinned: a second PSA 9 of the same card closed at $3,410.16 on 37 bids, 1.01x from the first. Two independent auctions landing $39.84 apart is about as close as this market gets to a quoted price — which is what makes the distance down to the ungraded copy measurable rather than anecdotal.

By the numbers

• $3,450.00 vs $990.00 — the PSA 9 drew 31 bids. The ungraded copy drew 1, so the floor of this gap is one bidder meeting an opening price, not a contest.
• $39.84 — the distance between Tuesday’s two PSA 9 copies, on 31 and 37 bids.
• 28 pairs, 13 publishable — same card, same sales day, both prices confirmed paid.

Reality check

Grading does not always pay like that. A PSA 8 1994-95 Topps Finest #331 Refractor took $2,025.00 on 32 bids while an ungraded Refractor took $1,800.00 on 44 bids — $225.00 for the slab, 1.12x, and our own floors refused that pair as too narrow to write about. Tuesday’s widest spread is the mirror image: 10.58x on a 2003-04 Topps #221 LeBron James rookie, $8,726.80 against $825.00 — and neither side drew a single bid. Both of those are asking prices somebody met. 6 of Tuesday’s 13 pairs rest on a dearer side with no bids at all, so read the bid counts in the table below before you read the multiples.

Zoom in

The 1997-98 Skybox Metal Universe Championship #23 Jordan repeated the lead’s structure almost exactly: a PSA 9 at $1,000.00 on 16 bids, a second PSA 9 at $982.90 on 24 bids, and the ungraded copy at $255.00 on 22 bids — 3.92x on $745.00, with the graded side again set by two contested auctions 1.02x apart. Full board for Tuesday, and the rest of the sports collectibles desk — last week’s edition is here.

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.