Welcome back to The Hobby Wire: the newsletter for collectors, investors, and everyone trying to make sense of this wild hobby.
At the start of each month, we take a step back and look at where the sports card world actually stands. What’s moving the market, what’s on deck, and what’s worth your attention over the next 30 days.
Before we get into it, one quick note.
This post marks one year of The Hobby Wire. We’re sitting at 750 subscribers and counting. That’s further than we ever would have expected to get in twelve months.
We’re thinking we might just stick around a bit.
One ask, and it’s the only one we’ll make up top. If something we’ve written over the last year helped you make a smarter buy or dodge a bad box, send it to a collector who’d use it. That’s how this thing grows.
Back to the grind. August didn’t slow down at all.
Let’s rip in.
Previously on The Hobby Wire…
We stayed busy last month. Here's the short version:
We put out a Wax Watch and Value Index for 2025-26 Topps Chrome Update Basketball, though we couldn't find any in the wild to rip for ourselves.
We took a hard look at Adley Rutschman to see whether the Red Sox trade opened a buying window on his cards.
We kicked off a new series, Under the Hammer, where we give firsthand accounts of working with the hobby's biggest auction houses. First up: Goldin.
We contributed to The Data Dugout’s MLB Rookie Rankings piece, weighing in on the Munetaka Murakami card market.
We provided full coverage of the 2026 Topps Flagship Football, start to finish.
And if you've ever watched your team draft their QB of the future only to have him hold a clipboard for two seasons, we went back through recent examples to figure out when the right time to buy actually shows up.
The Curious Case of the Sitting QB
Topps Flagship Football dropped yesterday. If you read our Wax Watch, you already know where we stand as far as this rookie class is concerned. But there are still a couple of names we're keeping our eye on, at least for now. Today it's Ty Simpson.
Around the Hobby
There was other news in August. All of it got buried by the Cooper Flagg Rookie Debut Patch Auto.
The bounties started before Chrome Update Basketball even hit shelves. The Dallas Mavericks offered 32 years of season tickets to whoever pulled it. Ken Goldin offered a $1.5 million cash advance. And Alt did something we’ve never seen before. They auctioned the card without any agreement to sell it, just to show the owner what their platform could do.
None of it was enough.
Fanatics came in aggressive and kept the card in-house, adding it to their September Premier Auction along with the Dylan Harper and Kon Knueppel RDPAs. The terms of that negotiation stayed private.
So Fanatics made the card. And now Fanatics is selling the card. We’re not surprised.
This is exactly what they were describing back in May at the Topps Industry Conference when they talked about streamlining the whole redemption process.
August also saw Fanatics deliver on another promise from that same conference. Topps Instant Packs. Released alongside 2025-26 Topps Chrome Black Basketball, collectors could buy individual packs on Fanatics Collect. The experience is fully digital, but you're still pulling physical cards that live in the Fanatics Vault.
We bought a couple packs and, honestly, we’re kind of here for it.
Instant Packs give collectors a way into a premium release without buying a full box. Keeping the whole thing inside the Fanatics ecosystem also stops scalpers from buying up inventory and doubling the price overnight.
Where it needs work is the odds disclosure. These shouldn’t sit separate from the regular odds sheet. Especially when you can pull the same parallels and case hits out of both.
Baseball
With the final month of the season here, teams are locked in on the playoffs. Collectors? We’re watching the MVP race.
Yordan Alvarez has the AL all but wrapped up. The NL has been neck and neck between reigning MVP Shohei Ohtani and Cubs superstar Pete Crow-Armstrong. After the August Crow-Armstrong just put together, if you participate in the Topps Chrome MVP buyback program, you might want to start getting those PCA cards in order.
His rookie auto is already up 400% since Opening Day. There's room for it to keep climbing.
Going the other direction, and just as surprising, is Cal Raleigh.
A year after belting 60 home runs, he's hitting .171 with only 20 to his name. This is starting to feel like more than a slump for the Big Dumper, and collectors are heading for the exits. His rookie refractor is down almost 60% on the year.
Is this the end of the line for Raleigh collectors, or the buying window of the year? When the season wraps, expect Collector's Case Studies on both of these guys.
MVP Odds
NL
Pete Crow-Armstrong — -1600
Shohei Ohtani — +900
AL
Yordan Alvarez — -2500
Junior Caminero — +1300
CY Young Odds
NL
Jacob Misiorowski — -1400
Chris Sale — +750
AL
Cam Schlittler — -170
Dylan Cease — +145
Rookie of the Year Odds
NL
Sal Stewart — -600
Nolan McLean — +500
AL
Kevin McGonigle — -450
Parker Messick — +270
Basketball
We’re in the quiet months of NBA news. Klay Thompson got bought out by the Mavs and is headed to Miami. Cleveland landed Peyton Watson in a five-team trade, adding the wing defense a Donovan Mitchell and James Harden core badly needed.
The bigger story is in Los Angeles. The Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion, and Luka Dončić cards have been basically flat for three months running. If new ownership commits to building a real contender around him, this might be as good a buying window as we get on a top-five player.
2026/27 NBA Championship Odds
San Antonio Spurs/OKC Thunder — +270
76ers/Knicks— +900
MVP Odds
Victor Wembanyama — +225
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — +350
Nikola Jokić — +475
Rookie of the Year Odds
Cameron Boozer — +300
Darryn Peterson — +330
Caleb Wilson — +350
Football
T-minus nine days to kickoff.
August gave us training camp and preseason answers to some of the biggest questions collectors carried through the offseason.
Kyler Murray did, in fact, take the QB1 job from JJ McCarthy in Minnesota. Since that announcement landed on 8/11, their Silver Prizms have gone in opposite directions.
Murray is up a respectable 23%. McCarthy has dropped 52%.
Preseason doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme. But if you’re a rookie QB and you throw a few picks, the hobby gets shaky fast. Fernando Mendoza, the cover man for 2026 Topps Flagship Football, did exactly that.
The cards haven't been out long and the drop is already steep. When the parallels start free-falling too, that's a sign that this isn’t just the hype of a brand new release fading away.
2026 MVP Odds
Josh Allen — +600
Lamar Jackson — +800
Joe Burrow — +850
Upcoming Wax Releases
September is looking like a month with a lot of premium releases:
2026 Panini Donruss WNBA — 09.04.26
2026 Bowman Chrome Baseball — 09.09.26
2025-26 Topps Definitive Basketball — 09.17.26
2025-26 Topps Pristine Basketball — 09.24.26
2026 Topps Baseball x KAWS Box — 09.28.26
2026 Topps Museum Collection Baseball — TBD September
2026 Topps Cosmic Chrome Baseball — TBD September
2025-26 Topps Royalty Basketball — TBD September
Release dates sourced from Steel City Collectibles and are subject to change.
Collector’s Corner
(Recommended Reads)
A few articles from around the hobby caught our eye this month.
How Fanatics Landed the Cooper Flagg Debut Patch Auto for Consignment — Lucas Mast, Sports Illustrated
Thanks for Reading!
That’s a wrap on this month’s State of the Hobby. Jump into the comments and tell us what you’re watching, how you’re reading the market, and what you want us to dig into next.
Your feedback shapes how we cover this thing. See you next month.
— The Hobby Wire Team
If you enjoyed this edition, subscribe to The Hobby Wire. Along with the monthly State of the Hobby, we cover player spotlights, product reviews, collector insights, and market trends. Everything you need to stay plugged in.
And if you want more, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid members get an additional article every week: more deep dives, more player spotlights, and analysis we can’t always fit into the free edition. If that sounds like your kind of thing, we’d love to have you.
Disclaimer: The content in The Hobby Wire is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Commentary, analysis, and opinions on sports cards, rookies, and the hobby are not financial, investment, or professional advice. Collectors should always do their own research before buying, selling, or trading cards. Market values are volatile and can change rapidly—past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Unless specified, all pricing references are based on the Prizm/Refractor parallels of an athlete’s Chrome rookie card, with prices from market movers, alt.xyz & 130pt.com.
Any odds mentioned were derived from DraftKings Sportsbook, unless otherwise specified.
Congrats on the year, and on 750.
"So Fanatics made the card. And now Fanatics is selling the card." That auction is one side of it – they also store the card, and set the market value your seller fee is measured against if you list it on Buy Now.
That fee doubles from 6% to 12% depending on where your listing sits against that number, and it can be set by hand: three of mine were appraised manually, two well above Card Ladder and one low enough that I filed for a review.
Beyond that, the part I keep coming back to is FanCash No Fees – a genuinely good deal, and US sellers only. I'm in Europe, so the one lever that takes the seller fee to zero is the one I can't pull.
Do you get much from readers outside the US? Curious whether that side ever comes up for you.