alright we are back another episode of the staging area with my good friends dc sports eighty seven lot to talk about today i tory i have to ask you about your the andrew jones encounter i saw the clips i saw we were battling chat gpt on facts and truth but what was the experience like for you meeting your favorite baseball player and getting to go live with him yeah it it was awesome i was pulling up on my phone rudely while you're talking we are at one point two million views on that reel so it's like look it's it's exciting for us because you know like we've talked about this before so much of what like dc sports eighty seven does can become very transactional and so we we need to pivot into more like engaging stuff and fun things it's like what better way than have athletes in house for even just in this case it was half of our stream we ended up being live for four hours that night we had andrew for the first hour and a half of that stream and just you know my geo from sem was with us and those guys were like debating who was the better feeler him or manny ramirez this is random stuff and we went through andrew's you know mount rushmore of all time braves and then we have the chatgpt moment which i think we've decided chat gbt was answering regular season stats and not including postseason which is why i didn't catch that but it was awesome so yeah cool to see like that clip take off and people enjoy it but yeah i can very happily and with great deal of relief and reduced anxiety say the don't meet your heroes did not apply to me andrew could not have been a more like down to earth fun guy to interact with just talking baseball talking cards still incredibly knowledgeable about the game i mean he was up on we were at the local shop here we ripped a couple boxes of twenty twenty three bowman baseball because that's his son drew jones is in that product and so knowledgeable on all the prospects all the up and coming guys a lot of cool insights on the league today and what's going on and so incredible experience for us wealth of content we'll be releasing in the coming weeks and months leading up to his hall of fame induction here in three months so yeah absolutely awesome experience did you get a chance to show him your collection i i did yeah i i showed him my my little shrine on my wall and took a picture with him where it's like him me and the dead center is like my case on the wall of like all my twenty four karat gold and pmgs and bat barrels and knobs and all that stuff so it was cool i i tried not to to fanboy too hard but yeah incredibly down to earth guys who made it very easy and yeah it was awesome at the live signed a bunch of cards for us while we were streaming gave those away to people you know the show was so busy unfortunately we kinda didn't get to as much of the chat as i'd hoped because we were just flying through stuff but yeah had a really good time it was awesome we will be doing it again with him and with other athletes for sure i would love before we move off this topic and this is i think this would be fun for anyone to understand you mentioned the reel you put up had you know a million plus views what on the other side of that obviously it's exciting and fun to get a lot of people to check out your content to understand your brand i would imagine that you you the d c sports eighty seven instagram handle gained more followers were was there like from a moment like that was there anything that stood out to you like just dropping a piece of content like that and the ripple effects yeah i mean it's it's cool you know i think it's it's one of those things that it's great for the brand but more so it's it it really is just fun like it is just cool to be able to put stuff out that has so much more it's so much more organic and and it's just a cool interaction with an athlete and just it's really not a commercial for dc sports eighty seven but anytime you have that many people seeing something where the banner in the background is our logo and it's put out by our account like there's value to us from a business standpoint there but for us we just you know we're just looking to grow in in all areas and sometimes that's the number of cards that come in the front door but that can also just be getting our name out there and having something get shared you know thousands and thousands of times and has a soon to be hall of famer there front and center it's just exciting and so for us it's how do we do more of that so we're gonna have you know some athletes at the booth at the national this year we're gonna have more athletes coming into town here in richmond to do these live streams so just something we're gonna lean into more but it's really not you know as much of a measurable like win for us as it's just a position we wanna be in and it's just it's awesome to have the luxury of being able to do it excited to see more of that coming from you and your team i have to ask and we've got a lot to get into but i have to ask you have you seen the industry number that cardladder put out regarding march data yet oh like total sales in march yeah have you seen it yet i have not i didn't prep you i i just saw it right before we hit record my question to you this is gonna be fun because you don't know it do you think the number was higher and this this will be fun because you'll probably be answering it from the perspective of what's going on in your world but right do you think the number was higher or lower than february's four eighty one oh i'm i'm trying to think of what sets came out because i feel like that's often driving it and we're a little further away from some of the basketballs i'll say higher just because i feel like everything just keeps going up but i don't know what if i what if i told you the number was six hundred and five million you know are you surprised compared to what we're seeing happen with our business and our little vacuum and on ebay and everywhere else i'm not really that surprised but the amount of increase month over month is surprising i was i was thinking higher and i was thinking you were gonna tell me yeah i need to buy it like five zero two not not soaring past six hundred and sounds like just racing towards eventually like the inevitable billion dollar month coming up yeah it's it's i get questions from non card people because i try to share some of this stuff in on channels like linkedin to just let people know hey i'm working in sports cards and there's actually some fun stuff going on here but i inevitably like people ask me like is this thing does it just go up forever or if it if it or is it gonna crash and i'm like i'm just wanna be like well how much time do you have but i don't like like it feels like this we've just been on this rocket ship for some time but i think we need to like be a little like sober about it at times to and not be like it's gonna go out forever but i don't know like i'm looking at what's happening in the surrounding conditions and the infrastructure and the big cards coming out and the new people coming in and and feel i i don't know it feels like this we're on a track that's going to at least remain on a specific tier for for a while now just based on the investment from a a ton of different entities and stakeholders but i don't know like what's your reaction like it's it's we've been through these nightmare moments where it just falls off the table but from my point of view it feels like it's not just going to fall off the table but i'd love your reaction yeah no i i don't think it is either and it's especially this year because we just have so much going on you know as we continue to see more licensed products coming out of tops for football and basketball like we've seen these basketball numbers like this license stuff is wild what it's doing and so you've got everything going on there we're just kinda kicking up baseball season so there's a lot there and i feel like it's also one of these things where because there are so many new people and the hobby is on such a tear right now and i feel so many people are so bullish about it it's almost like everybody's trying to stay ahead of the market so it's okay if all the the heat and attention and demand is right here i'm gonna look at where else maybe there's something to get in early on and it's awesome but at the same time is it it's like we're always gonna be chasing something so there's always something new driving it like i know you know for us back end of last year coming into this year obviously sports was on fire but like the tcg world is insane right now if you look at the numbers being done by pokemon and one piece in particular but even the yu gi oh and dragon ball z and some of the other things out there i feel like the explosion of the number of sets we get in disney marvel star wars you know wrestling tennis like other things that just haven't been big in the past it's not only do we have growth on the existing like verticals within cards that were there a year ago but we also have these exponential growth numbers in some of these more niche like side ones and those just all roll up to big numbers so you know march for us was twenty two point five million and that's our biggest month ever so you know we were up over february which was up over january and so i everybody i've talked to it feels like the same thing is happening so yeah everything is just all signs point up right now what a month you mentioned the niche categories and i have the same observation that these little pockets in the hobby that might not have gotten a ton of attention or might have had a passionate fan base before now cards are becoming more scarce prices are going up i know this just as a wrestling card collector in that community it's like can't get a card i want for under a thousand bucks at this point and it's right it's just it's just wild like do you think it's is like what do you think is causing the confidence in some of those smaller areas is it you know more content is it more just attention from the manufacturers more structure around those groups like you have any thoughts on like why outside the major four categories everything else is kinda going up yeah i mean i think it's it's multiple of what you just said but you know i think for one if you look at and i give fanatics a lot of credit for this i mean if you look at what fanatics has done over the last you know year or two in particular but really ever since they you know acquired tops and got involved in everything there's so much push to how do we kind of like normalize or like socialize the hobby right and so it's bringing more people into all those areas and i think you look at things like wrestling's a good example now i'm gonna call that a non sport card because sports aren't scripted so you know fair fair figure what we want with that comment but you know it's one of those things where it's like wrestling has a radical fan base i mean just people are so invested in it they've got their guys and there's these events and look at how much media they get if i look at facebook and instagram feeds and i look at you know advertisements i see places and i think in the past before you know tops really kinda took off what they're doing the that was kind of an underserved segment of the hobby same with tennis like look how much attention there is in tennis and in tennis you do have this consolidation of like power and ranking to the top handful of people and we didn't have enough sets for carlos alcaraz when he first hit right like we gotta go buy netpro cards to get his rookies and things like that so i think as you look at wrestling and ufc and tennis and whatever other niche we wanna talk about no they're not like a core four sport like you mentioned but there are a ton of people invested in those and as we overlap more interest in the sport with interest in the hobby which i think is a big social push right now mhmm content helps that to your point we bring more people in people are already entering the hobby out of curiosity to seeing it take off and so it's just kind of this perfect storm and that's why i think this trend up continues all year because we're gonna see that continue to happen we've got the baseball season that'll carry us for a while we're gonna have football come back around with a ton of quarterbacks we've got the world cup in the states this summer which is gonna put a lot of eyes on on soccer it's just like hit after hit after hit after hit of things that kinda keep carrying us so it's as much as it's you wanna be a little bit conservative and have some cautious optimism it's it's hard to see like when do we hit the brakes because yes there's no writing on the wall that tells me it's gonna happen anytime soon it's fun because the conversation just isn't around vintage baseball or high end basketball when we're talking about these big sales and i think that diversity is healthy for the hobby we've got some cards we're gonna jump into how are you feeling just right after we're couple weeks out from opening day how are you feeling about your orioles right now what did you say it's been it's been a mixed bag so as of recording now we're you know three and three we'll we'll see it's you know i think baseball's hard because you know you and this goes for anybody right like in football if your team gets blown out in week one and your qb has no touchdowns and throws three picks it's over for him he might as well retire sell off all his cards so it's hard living in like the instant overreaction of the hobby while it's a hundred and sixty two game season in baseball so it's like you don't really even need to care that much until a month or two in but yeah i'm just happy baseball's back i'm i'm questioning where the ceiling is if such a thing exists for mister ohtani who i know is gonna be our first card up and maybe the only card we get to because there is so much to unpack with what's going on in his in his market but yeah i'm excited baseball's here can't wait to see more sets coming out this year i think we've got a more exciting rookie class than we did last year when it was kinda like nick kurtz and then what like we kinda had james wood but like overall wasn't that exciting so yeah very excited for the baseball season and the hobby year of baseball i promise we're talking about otani but one more i'm curious on the prospecting front has there been a baseball prospect you know in this first stretch that maybe unexpectedly has grabbed attention of the hobby based on a strong out of the gates performance did anyone stand out to you yeah i mean i you know i think everybody watches the sport so close now that if you're at all in two in baseball chase the water is probably name number one you know made his debut this year he's just absolutely killing it for the guardians you know i think most of his stuff is about tripled in the last few weeks but it's it's really good because it's it that's the scary part about baseball and the hobby right because you get so much hype between eighteen through twenty one year olds who haven't even debuted yet and the market cap on these guys goes through the roof and that is what's gonna happen but we saw jj weatherholt hit a homer in his mlb debut and then had a walk off hit two days later we saw carson bench hit a homer in his debut we've seen kevin mcgonigal come out of the gate crazy hot chased a lotter on fire right now so there are a good number of names and connor griffin didn't start with the pirates he's the biggest prospect in baseball but it's just destroying the ball down in triple a right now and i'm sure he'll be up before long so good to see the guys that had so much momentum carrying it into the season and not just kinda like the hype train going off the rails day one so yeah no don't you don't have to say sorry i'll talk baseball questions all later on i don't i don't care what's on our agenda or what we wanna cover today so you're you're not gonna bother me okay this is good because this inspired another thought you just mentioned debut home runs obviously the debut patch cards are the cards what does a debut home run do for a debut patch card if the player continues on an upward trajectory it's just another yeah story to add on to why this card matters right right it it definitely matters because you know unlike most relics you know the exact game it was worn and so i think that's awesome what i'm really curious about is will we see you know and i'm sure you've seen this like you see all the content coming from players and tops and everybody but like the players i think have more appreciation for what the hobby is than they did five or ten years ago and so you see these guys like with cool inscriptions you know i saw there was the one where jack kegleon and bobby witt like wrote inscriptions to each other and there was the trout where he wrote hi shohei a few years ago and things like that so i'm really curious with like the debut patches are we gonna start seeing you know jj weatherholt has his debut patch when he goes to sign it are we gonna get first major league home run or you know debut home or like are these guys gonna add some of those little pieces to it so it definitely helps when the game is meaningful and that kind of stuff happens but i think a lot of that will be on the player to kinda like commemorate that on the card i'm not sure if it'll as the years pass are we gonna remember what happened in the debut game we're gonna remember a great rookie year kind of a the sum of the parts but yeah i i hope so we'll see you you mentioned a player that when i jumped back in the hobby when i think thought baseball cards he was the first player that came to mind based on the coverage but with mike trout and i i haven't seen it's been crazy it's like there was this passing of the baton in on the collectibles front from mike trout to ohtani and i don't think ohtani's ever gonna give that back but i think this makes us think right like there's been so many people who've bought into mike trout during you know he's has these record war years and you know you know first ballot hall of famer everyone's speculating and is really maybe the ken griffey junior of this era for a certain segment of fans and collectors like how how do you think how are you thinking about mike trout and his cards right now because i know it's been a a roller coaster ride but you know we're back and you know he's part of the converse he might not be ohtani or judge but he's part of the conversation yeah and it's weird with trout like you mentioned war and i was just looking it up i don't have this all memorized so don't give me too much credit but like he's got a career war of eighty eight now but that's over sixteen years he's got like it looks like forty six or so of that war in a five year run from two thousand twelve to two thousand sixteen so it is a case where at the end of his career the number's gonna be phenomenal he's gonna be a first battle hall of famer and he's interesting in the hobby you know this year he homered in his first two games and it's like okay he's back so so we'll have to see you know i really think what we just need is we just need a couple more years of fully healthy mike trout because we've had all these years of injury disappointments like gosh you just feel for the guy because you can see when he like talks about in interviews how much it hurts him to miss time but like i said he's gonna be a hall of famer we just need enough health to like get to that five hundred home run mark that's gonna be exciting hopefully the angels can put it together or maybe he leaves i don't know at some point let's get to see him in a deep playoff runs we've never gotten to see that before and just kinda let him have some of those moments and i think if we had two or three fully healthy years we see thirty forty homers a year we see them hit five hundred we see them go to the playoffs it would just be really helpful where like that's what we can remember at the end is just this insane peak and this still peaking at this age and we don't remember the what could have been you know injury what ifs that are just not fun for anybody if we're looking for a hobby spokesman on the baseball front mike trout's a pretty darn good one so oh yeah for sure he he's he's up there no doubt alright let's move over to the card a card that i think there's gonna be a lot of meat on this bone this sold through dc sports eighty seven on march twenty ninth it is the twenty twenty six top shohei ohtani all aces psa ten the first and only psa ten that is sold it is a pop three and this card sold for fifteen thousand four hundred and sixteen dollars there's a lot of directions we can go with this but i i just wanna open it up tory because i know before the call you mentioned to me you were excited that this made the list yep so let's let's hear what you got regarding this card in sale yeah so you know i know we were talking a little bit before so you know to me i think the all aces cards and the previously you know we've got the all kings for the hitters so i'm kind of talk when i say anything about all aces i'm talking about both right now you know i'm sure people have seen the all kings from the hitters going off as well but they're kind of becoming the downtown or kaboom of baseball like you know baseball is so heavy on prospects and we're all about chrome color and autographs it's like that's what we're always chasing give me a guy's first bowman chrome auto give me his bowman or top chrome rookie auto in big colors as we're after short prints have never quite been a thing they they're there for sure you know we even look at some of the panini sets that have come out you know you can get panini three and two i think has like the downtown inserts and the panini prospect edition and like the stars and stripes sets do have kabooms and they're valuable but they're nothing like the demand we see in football and basketball and so it's great to have one that has really taken off and caught on and so it's it it's awesome i i think the sale makes sense we're just talking about atani there's really no ceiling on this card right now and i think what's interesting too is what this kind of does as far as other sets and i know this is kinda changing the topic of narrative on it a little bit but with this specific card get it these are these are impossible polls so to get one in a ten like you said pop three first to sell get it what's interesting is to look at what this has done in past years because the all aces in twenty five and twenty six are super short printed really tough to hit go back to like twenty twenty three tops there's no tony all aces card it's kind of an every everyday answer like it's not that interesting they were selling for thirty bucks it wasn't a big deal for a long time now these come out and i think the price point on these is not accessible to a lot of people and so now we're seeing that twenty twenty three one that is not short printed that used to be a thirty dollar raw card do three hundred dollars raw do twelve hundred dollars in a psa ten and so it's just interesting you know to get to the point we we talked about a little bit and we kinda wanted to to tease out a little on this conversation is just you know when is it rarity when is it perceived scarcity and when is it just simply demand is insane know i think we've had the conversation before that in football and basketball like downtowns and kabooms are tough hits but there's a lot of them out there like they're they're not the rarest thing in the world but there's just so much demand that the prices just kinda soar and you know you pair a set with soaring prices with the name shohei ohtani and hello fifteen thousand dollar pop resale so yeah the the way we're wired is to always think that first are the most important and i find it rare to see that the first has more availability than the later years like this twenty twenty six we're like i think about kabooms and just the way they've rolled in you know the earlier stuff is you look at the pop reports it's more rare and scarce than the later stuff and this happens across so many parallels we could spend all day talking about it it's rare that it's the opposite that like we're starting off with a lot and then we're whittling it down and i think you need to in order to understand you gotta look at the data you gotta look at pop reports but i don't know like it being the reverse it being different than it normally is just on the rarity and scarcity front like what do you think that means maybe like from a manufacturer perspective and then what what does that mean from like the market perspective do you think these are obviously we're talking about this on a podcast we're sharing the information but i don't know like does everyone see this does everyone know this like what are your thoughts yeah i mean i think these you know we've got two years of them as these really tough ten inserts now i think everybody knows how valuable these are what i'm really curious about is to see what's the tops move here right so i think we saw as kabooms caught on and downtowns caught on we start to see those be in more sets and it was you know we don't just have downtown in you know i think it started in studio in like two thousand sixteen seventeen in basketball and now we've got them in you know don russ has downtowns and don russ optic has downtowns and more sets have those and kabooms and and things like that so it'll be interesting to see what's tops' move here is it hey this is a crazy popular card set you know the all aces and all kings and do we start to do that with more of our sets or is it we wanna keep it kinda limited in supply to not try to you know oversaturate for purposes of exceeding demand i feel like everything we've said today is the hobby's on a tear it keeps going up everybody's bullish about it so it's like if it's popular keep putting it out there because people are just gonna eat it up all day long but yeah i you know i think your point about first is interesting too it's like when we look at the twenty twenty three tops alesis ohtani what's really driving that i think a big part of that is we have this one that's doing insane money it's thousands and thousands even raw and so that kind of lifts all all aces cards even when they weren't that rare but is some of it the same way we look at you know the early like two thousand twelve prism silvers and is it we say okay those were the first year of this like iconic thing so it's got value twenty twenty three tops first year of all aces so if you look at that and say that's kind of like the tracing back and so we're not gonna solve this today but yeah it's interesting when you just look at all these things and say there's you know this variable of supply demand perceived scarcity you know actual value of being the first or it not being the first it being short printed or the not short printed one who the player is how the market receives it and there's just so many angles come at this so i get the value on this one to get it back to this twenty twenty six all aces otani but you know it's gonna be interesting to see how that spreads throughout the sport and the hobby for sure the decision to sell this card and to sell this card now i think is it's interesting and i would love to have a conversation with whoever subbed it to just get their mindset because you have two competing things going on you have the this is the most popular player in this set this is there's only three of these right now who knows how far this in popularity this guy could go this set this is certainly a card or an asset you wanna hang on to but there's obviously risk if the pop report continues to fill up so you've got like that dynamic going on but then you also have the i have this the best card in the highest grade right now and i know the rules of the hobby that i should be the first to list this and sell it and obviously you can't deny that fifteen k is an awful lot of money for yep a card like this so you've got that dynamic and i think the interesting part about collectibles and cards that i'm finding is ohtani will ohtani is telling us that whatever rules you have in place or you've lived and operated by for so long like you can go ahead and flush those down the toilet because this is like he is a unicorn unicorn guy in this space that we know and love so i don't know with those dynamics with the like obviously they chose to sell it which you can't you can't point point and make fun of them like that's a whole heck of a lot of money for a card like this but like i don't know with ohtani like does he change the way that in a scenario like this we should consider like either holding or selling a card like how do you process that yeah and this one so i can tell you i i know who owns this card and we're not gonna go and just you know put people on blast with personalized names and socials on the podcast here but i can say this was graded through high end case breaks who we work with i would say hands down the best submitter if you've got higher end cards you wanna work with somebody just the team they've got over there as far as looking at cards hey how well do we think this is gonna grade it's kind of a white glove they live right there in california psa's backyard so anyway if anybody's looking to grade high encase breaks dot com shout out those guys they're phenomenal but this is a great customer of theirs who sells a lot through us deals with a lot of high end so i'm not gonna question this person's choice and i would have done the exact same thing for the record i think to your point this is kind of the the two viewpoints that would be at odds with each other here our number one we see somebody selling a card for a hundred bucks and the rule in the hobby right now feels like if i have one to sell next week i'm just gonna say last one did a hundred i want one twenty and then the next week the guy's gonna say well last one did one twenty out one fifty and we just have this assumption that because ohtani is this unstoppable force the same applies to his values there's gonna trend up forever while at the same time this was the first psa ten sale which you said right off the top and so we always talk about this new releases come out you wanna be the first to sell one of those cards things start getting graded from those new products you wanna be the first to sell psa ten so i think the the latter there carries more weight than the former of holding on and hoping because man this stuff is just so hot as it is and then of course the other day he goes out starts his first game this season i think it was six shutout one hit innings with six strikeouts the dodgers win and it's like okay well and then he he comes off the pitching mail and runs back and then we saw the clip and he like forgets for a second he's like oh shoot i'm also leading off and he's gotta go run and grab his bat and his helmet to hit so yeah he unicorn for sure and so those i think are generally the two arguments is you wanna be first and you wanna time right and i think it's just safer to time it when you know you're already gonna do phenomenally well than kinda wait and wait and wait and see how the hobby responds what's going on with otani because it has to end eventually i just don't know when eventually is and for all i know it's ten years from now so you know we gotta wait and see there's obviously we're spending a lot of time on otani we always do when he comes up but yeah i don't know i'm so fascinated by the fact that he's got pitching cards and he's got hitting cards and i haven't looked or analyzed but i would imagine he's got more hitting cards than pitching cards just in the grand scheme and we know that like power hitters usually do better than pitchers from a a a collectible perspective but these are just preexisting narratives but have you is there like what is the market reaction regarding like his you know aces versus kings or just pitching cards versus hitting cards i would imagine because the hobby loves scarcity there's less pitching cards but i but then on the other side probably the hitting cards are more popular like i don't know like i'm sure we could do a whole like lesson on the data and what the signals are telling us but like what are your observations just in terms of the demand based on if he's hitting or if he's pitching on the card yeah so admittedly i haven't done the homework here to know the right answer i know that i've seen like psa bgs nine and raw copies of his twenty twenty five all kings so you know same rarity hitting card doing i think like nine thousand dollar ballpark so given that i think we can safely assume a psa ten would likely exceed that exceed what this one did at fifteen may maybe it's the same the same range and it is interesting because there was a time not that long ago when i would have told anybody like we don't invest in pitchers that's just a rule it's like almost like investing in a defensive player in football like you just kinda don't do it because there's not the same buzz you don't invest in a a defensive player on a hockey team as much because they're not the one scoring goals and like all these kind of preconceived notions like you said that we have but then it's also funny timing in the hobby because we're just a year or two in to like paul schien's kinda changing that narrative and he flipped everything where we went after pictures all of a sudden and then we started seeing the jacob mizrauskas who took off and people got behind him and all these other guys kinda lined up and these highly drafted pitchers now were saying well could they be the next that you know look at cam schlittler the pitcher for the yankees in the playoffs last year at a couple phenomenal games and his just base first autos out of chrome got up to like five hundred dollars there for a little bit and so now that we're kind of letting hype and buzz do that and we're kinda tearing down the wall of what can't be pitchers i think it's a lot more evened out but you know i i don't know with otani i don't know is often gonna be the answer because we have never really been here before with somebody and so we're gonna have to see how things play out over time what's before we get move off the otani topic what to you what is what is obviously it's impressive that he's able to do both at the level that he is able just a little yeah you know going going fifty fifty and striking guys out on the mound it's you know maybe the most impressive thing we've ever seen in the sport but yeah what for you as you watch this guy and he's captivated the hearts and minds of you know baseball and collectors like what is the most impressive thing about this guy to you i i mean i think it is just the fact that he's done it at such a high level and you know he's had his injuries with pitching yes but for the most part like he's been on the field right like even when he had injuries to deal with he was still hitting and i think it's just that we're used to and we're just almost saying the hobby out of it saying why is he so impressive it's like we're used to looking at somebody and saying wow they do this like i remember one of my favorite times in baseball ever now it was right when i was like early teens so perfect timing was the mcguire associate thing in ninety eight which i do think kinda brought us all back to baseball and saved it a little bit now they were on roided out of their minds i get it i i wish that we would just put that aside when it comes to hall of fame voting because like gary bonds needs to be in alex rodriguez needs to be in clemons needs to be in there's a lot of these guys who just need to be in the hall of fame but that's not the argument we're here to have but like maguire had seasons where he had like seventy home runs and his total hits were like hundred and thirty and i was like okay like he just didn't do everything and then we have the guys you'll see come up right and and they can steal sixty bases but there's no power and you've got the pitchers who are these power arms you can strike people out but they give up runs like it's like everybody seems to have a weakness and to me ohtani is kind of like kind of like a barry bond situation at the plate but applied to them pitching too where it's like bond didn't really have a weakness like walked hit for power crazy power hit for average great contact guy he was fast and it's like so we've got ohtani who can steal fifty bases in a year can hit fifty on runs in a year could strike out two hundred people in a year like there's just it's just everything and so it just it's cool because it makes the narrative just have so much fuel to the fire that it's the reason that we've seen this stuff go up and up and up for years straight now without stopping and we didn't need like it was skyrocketing the last few months before this season season even started right and so i'm just sitting back and watching at this point i am not invested in otani he's not you know a guy i'm out buying cards of you know i stick to my my pc guys that's it but but yeah i'm very curious when we check back in on this conversation in like two years to see what we found so am i but i'm i'm it takes someone like this to you know pull me into a category that i don't collect and every time i see a sale like this i just get i have more questions i'm more fascinated and i think that's what baseball needs they need a guy who can do this for and bring in outsiders so excited to always talk about ohtani cards and we've got other cards but we're gonna just we we we already talked about it we're gonna spend a lot of time on ohtani and we did before we get out of here i kinda wanted to dig in with you i've been thinking a lot about this and i i i'm don't know where you're at right now but i'm already thinking national i'm trying to think of plans and what we're what we're gonna be doing and how we're gonna be doing it areas of investment content all this stuff and i remember last year we were talking maybe postnational you were talking about or maybe before national you're talking about like the area of investment and just getting the brand seen and obviously i feel like dc sports eighty seven has shown up in more places over the last twelve to eighteen months than you have previously and we've talked about this on episodes like areas of investment investment and like building trust and getting seen but i wanted to maybe you know as we kinda prepare for the national even though it's it it feels like it's far away it's not really i wanted to maybe get your reaction just like on all these like bets you've placed in areas that you've kinda put the brand in like what you've learned from this process like have there been areas where you've seen really good results have there been shortcomings like what have you learned from just kind of investing in marketing for you know the first time over the last twelve to eighteen months at dc sports yeah yeah you know some of them are it's super general lessons and maybe to some people it's like it's obvious you'd expect it but you know i think a big one is the hobby if you're in it all the time like you you work in a space full time so do i and i've been in it as a collector before it was even a business for me but you kinda it can feel like a small world to know so many people it's really interesting to us as we've leaned into sponsorships and having our brand and our signs all over the place in chicago at the national and collaborating with other influencers on content and things like that how many people will reach out to us and and just don't really know about what we do it's like yeah i've kinda heard your name yeah i bought a car from you on ebay once they don't know how consignment works they don't know what our rates are they don't know what they can sell with us they don't know do we take graded in raw cards our name is dc sports eighty seven do we only do sports like there's all these questions that to me are like no of course we don't only do sports or everybody is what consignment is don't you and like it just kind of been really revealing to see how even though a ton of people know our name not everybody knows what we do and so think the biggest learning for us has just been realizing the hobby is so big now that we put our name in a lot of new places we're reaching a lot of people who know very little about us and so some of those lead to really cool conversations and i may never work with a person but it's oh interesting and it moves on and some lead to great new people that we start partnering with and selling for them and it just kinda takes off from there so that's probably the biggest learning is just how many little pockets of the hobby you really gotta grind when it comes to like marketing and brand awareness to get your name out there enough that you can reach those people you hadn't before to have those conversations where either you learn why what we do isn't quite the right fit for somebody and then we can decide does it make sense for us to make a change or you just get to you know have new people you you bring in house and start working with because they just didn't know what you offered and it kinda goes from there so that's probably been the biggest theme across all of it for us but of course that varies a lot by like different environments and strategies and things and timing and places and all that that we've done i think you mentioned a twenty two and a half million dollar month and it's impossible to understand probably the dynamics of each one of those collectors who sent in package a package or multiple packages to help contribute to that number but i don't know like do you have a sense of is it a lot of is a lot of existing customers sending in more is it that plus a lot of net new people like do you have any pulse on new customers if they're like first time customers or if they're people coming for kinda their first you know experience with consignment i'm trying to get a pulse on as we talk about that crazy number that led off march like is this the same people doing more or is this more new people yeah it's it's it's both you know i'll say that typically if you remove like people who live in this space as a business so i'm taking out car shops breakers full time dealers things like that because those people have a constant in and out of turning over inventory so they're they're kinda separate but if you take them out and look at all the rest of our customers and there are tens of thousands of those now people tend to like if you looked at the quantity they're sending in it's often like spike and then drop to a certain point and they stay pretty flat so for us it's been a lot more about acquiring additional customers and working with new people than it is getting more from the same people and a lot of that is just because if someone kinda gets into consignment for the first time and they decide we've had this conversation before right like they look around their office and there's just cards everywhere and they realize they don't care about ninety percent of them for a lot of people the first move is like a mass clean out it's like alright here's i've got fifteen thousand cards in my office and i care about thirty two of them right so here's the other fourteen thousand nine hundred and sixty eight i'll go to dc and they and they go and then from there it's just like that steady flow of as they're breaking you know making deals buying things online moving to move their money from you know a card they were holding to sell later at a profit into a pc card like we'll see those things steadily come in so really we've talked about it before but the spikes are new customers and just when we make a big push or we do something on social we go to a show bringing new people in and then on top of that it's product based it's you know when tops and tops from basketball came out like everybody was breaking it everybody was so excited so it's just a mass influx by set that happens as well but it's yeah it's really just our our customer base is so much broader than it used to be that that's what it is is adding customers more than it's adding business with existing customers a lot jam packed in this episode tory before we get out of here i saw a post that you all put up on instagram and you i need to know has this dc sports eighty seven vintage business card sold on ebay yet oh my gosh so that got sent to me by by somebody and i didn't even know it was out there and i don't believe it is sold i mean we included those things in every single break package in every ebay purchase and granted we weren't doing the volume we're doing now but i can't imagine how many of those have been thrown away and there's still gotta be thousands of those sitting in the corner of people's drawers and card boxes and things like that all over the place but a hundred feels pretty aggressive but as i mentioned when we dropped that little reel i love that the username of the seller was send an offer so it was like you know what they got it up ninety nine bucks for best offer maybe i'll go through a three dollar offer adam and see what i can get you know who who knows i probably have one sitting around here somewhere so you know but it it was just kinda cool to see it was like i'm used to putting our name in ebay and i see our store and it was like our store and this and i was like okay i'm used to it being in the seller field this was the first time the dc sports eighty seven name was in the item description so i was like you know what it just just gotta call this out gotta share it because why not yeah who cares about that twenty two and a half million dollars in sales the true milestone is getting a listing live on ebay of a business card that's right yeah we are i will say that you you mentioned the national this year the national we're actually gonna be giving away one touches so so that'll be a cool hold on i'm gonna slide momentarily away from the camera so we've got we've been working with like the stand up displays people so we've got like these with the logo here and then we're gonna have another where the logo goes across the whole top and like all black so should be should be a fun little giveaway we've got like the one thirty point ones for thick cards and just the standard sized card ones and so i'm sure we'll do some kind of promotion of you know a card you hit at the national or buy at the national post a picture on social with our card stand and we'll we'll give something away or something like that but yeah so excited to do that we did t shirts last couple years and let me say people love to grab them for their kids but when you travel in a van with like five thousand t shirts it's not fun a nice little compact card one touch magnetic case for a card at a card show much better and more convenient for us so excited to make that switch this year collectors love their one touches so i like the the pivot there tory always fun to chop it up win a little broadway on the ohtani but we had we we knew we were gonna do that in advance and i think ohtani deserves the space at this point to be talked about on a podcast like this for sure for sure no doubt alright we'll be back with another one soon thank you everyone for listening thanks