Everyone knows about Michael Jordan’s brief hiatus playing baseball, devoting a season during the prime of his career to play minor-league ball for the Birmingham Barons in 1994.
But it might come as a shock to hear this brief interlude to Jordan’s Hall of Fame basketball career resulted in one of his most significant sports card releases: The first pack-pulled Jordan autograph.
One example sold this weekend at Heritage for a record $132,000.
Card collectors are now used to seeing on-card autographs appear inside retail packs, but back in the 1990s, it was a new phenomenon. Upper Deck had issued a few beginning with Reggie Jackson in the 1990 Baseball High Series, but the practice had yet to gain widespread acceptance until the end of the decade, when the 1997-98 Upper Deck Michael Jordan game-used patch and autographed card became one of his most iconic releases in history. The most expensive copy of that card sold for $2.7 million in October 2021.
But in the mid-1990s, with the release of the 1995 Top Prospects Michael Jordan Autograph card, featuring an on-card autograph atop an image of Jordan in his Birmingham Barons uniform, the world was officially introduced to the first pack-pulled Jordan autograph card.
Upper Deck, which had signed Jordan to an exclusive autograph deal a few years prior, surely thought its star would see his collectible interest take a nose-dive as he shifted from being the NBA’s top star to a minor-league baseball player, but with the issue of the SP Top Prospects series the company would have that notion summarily dismissed.
The set included unsigned and signed cards of only a few prospects, including “Bob” Abreu, Bartolo Colon, Nomar Garciaparra, Vladimir Guerrero and Jordan.
Despite his lack of success on a baseball diamond, Jordan’s legacy is such that all these years later, it’s his card that has become the most coveted of the bunch.
PSA has graded just four total copies of his autographed card from the set, with examples rarely transacting.
The last time a copy sold prior to this weekend’s sale of a PSA 7/Auto 8 copy was in January of this year, when a PSA 8/Auto 10 sold for $104,920 at Goldin.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.