$1,725: Genius or Idiot?

A 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani rookie in PSA 10 took 26 bids and closed at $1,725 — its comp pool's floor.

A 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani rookie, #150, in PSA 10, sold at auction for $1,725 on August 27 after 26 bids. Against 28 comparable sales of the same card at the same grade, that is 0.96x the median — and the first GENIUS verdict this column has printed.

Why it matters

A competitive auction set this price, not a seller’s Buy It Now, and it landed at the bottom of a tight pool of recent sales for the identical card in the identical slab. A 2018 Topps Chrome Ohtani in PSA 10 is not scarce — which is why it can be priced honestly.

By the numbers

• $1,801.50 — median of 28 matched comparable sales: same year, card number, grader, grade. The buyer paid $76.50 under it.
• 1.04 — the pool’s interquartile ratio, $1,799.99 to $1,875.00. Above 1.5 we quote no median at all.
• 26 — bids on the winning lot. Full marks on price discovery: the market set this number.

The intrigue

No comparable sale in the pool closed below $1,725: one copy matched what this buyer paid, none beat it. Liquidity backs that up — 28 confirmed sales of this card and grade cleared inside the comp window, so the exit market is demonstrable.

Reality check

The margin is $76.50 — on a $1,725 card, a good fill, not a steal. The score agrees: 36 of 40 on comp deviation, but 4 of 15 on scarcity, with no serial number, no autograph and a modern base rookie printed in volume. The 30-day and 90-day medians matched exactly, at 0.0%, so nobody is buying momentum. The pool also carries an unexplained tail: its highest comparable closed at $3,950 against an $1,875.00 75th percentile.

What's next

Score: 76/100 — comp deviation 36, price discovery 15, liquidity 12, trend 9, scarcity 4. Verdict: GENIUS, with no cap applied. Watch whether the $1,799.99 to $1,875.00 band holds: this card is flat between its 30-day and 90-day medians, so a repeat under $1,725 would mean the floor moved, not that someone found a bargain.

Between the lines

The biggest sale we tracked on August 27 was not this one: a 1956 Topps #33 Roberto Clemente White Back in PSA 8 at $12,000, unscoreable on 2 comparable sales. It was the first of 43 candidates skipped above this lead: 23 with too few comparables, 6 with pools so wide they mixed different cards (one a $5,500 Ohtani #150 Pink Refractor, 65 sales that do not belong beside a base copy), and 14 rejected before we spent anything: 9 print runs too small to build a sales history, 5 current-season products too new to have one. The sports browse returned 108 rows and the collectible-card-game browse 33, and repeat pulls return different sets, so 93 qualifying sales is a floor, not a total. Our Jordan column for the same day led on a card this pull never returned; yesterday’s edition is here.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards, and Best Offer Accepted listings — on those eBay publishes the seller’s asking price rather than the price actually paid. Prices are final sold prices. This verdict rests on 28 comparable sales of the same card at the same grade, requested across a 90-day window; every one of the 28 fell inside the most recent 30 days, so the pool describes a recent market rather than a full quarter. The buy score uses no population report, no sell-through or active-supply data, and no card-level search volume — those inputs are absent, not estimated. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.