Same Jordan Card Sold for $1,430 and $255

Four copies of Jordan's 1988-89 Fleer All-Star #120 closed Wednesday. The PSA 9 brought 5.61x the ungraded copy, and both sides were live auctions.

A PSA 9 copy of Michael Jordan’s 1988-89 Fleer All-Star #120 sold for $1,430.25 on Wednesday. An ungraded copy of the same card closed the same day at $255.00, and 16 bidders chased it there.

Why it matters

Both sides were contested auctions — 29 bids on the slab, 16 on the raw copy — so neither figure is one seller’s asking price. That makes the $1,175.25 between them a clean reading of what the grade is worth on a junk-wax-era card that is easy to find ungraded. It is the grading premium, not a mispricing somebody missed.

By the numbers

• 5.61x — what the PSA 9 brought against the ungraded copy, on a $1,175.25 gap.
• 4 copies — of the same card cleared Wednesday: the PSA 9, two PSA 8s at $650.00 and $586.00, and the raw copy at $255.00.
• 15 pairs, 4 publishable — same-card price pairs found across both players; four cleared our spread and gap floors.

Zoom in

The widest multiple of the day was not an auction at all. A PSA 10 2003-04 Topps #221 LeBron James rookie sold at a fixed $6,600.00 with no bids, against an ungraded copy that drew 12 bidders at $662.12 — 9.97x on a $5,937.88 gap. The top of that multiple is an asking price a buyer met; the bottom is a price bidders set. They are not the same quality of number.

Reality check

The last row on that table barely belongs there. A BGS 9 2003-04 Bowman #123 LeBron rookie at $721.00 against an ungraded copy at $450.00 is 1.6x on a $271.00 gap — 6.7% above the minimum spread we will print, with a single bid on the cheaper side. One unseen cheaper copy would have removed it. Read it as the thinnest fact on the page, not as a peer of the Jordan pair.

What's next

Four copies of the same Jordan All-Star #120 clearing in one day is enough same-day pricing to judge the next one against — we covered this same #120 on September 6. Jordan’s confirmed paid median on Wednesday was $475.00 and LeBron’s $539.99, so every pair above sold at a multiple of the typical card in its own market. More daily sales reads are in sports collectibles.

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.