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The story
A limited-edition autographed card commemorating Shohei Ohtani’s historic “50 home runs, 50 stolen bases” moment sold at auction for an all-time record of roughly ¥110 million (about $686,000). On 5ch, users buzzed with speculation about the buyer’s identity, comparisons to the record-breaking ¥2.5 billion Pokémon card sale, and jokes tying it back to Ippei Mizuhara’s gambling debts.
At the same time, plenty of commenters admitted they simply couldn’t wrap their heads around paying that much for “a single piece of paper.”
Shohei Ohtani’s Limited Card Sells for Record ¥110 Million — Signed Card Surpasses LeBron and Curry
Dodgers pitcher/DH Shohei Ohtani has set another record. A signed card commemorating his historic first-ever “50 home runs and 50 stolen bases” achievement — part of the limited-run, made-to-order “Topps NOW” series — has sold for an all-time record price of $686,250 (roughly ¥110 million).
“Topps NOW” is a special card series released for a limited time whenever a real game produces a historic moment, with sales windows typically running 24 to 48 hours.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Damn, I'm jealous…
"It's the second most popular sport after baseball" — Jockey Christophe Lemaire tells French media about horse racing's popularity in Japan
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/7228b8a5c4d19037698fd9dc032e840ac62af3d0
Not even sure horse racing counts as a sport, but it's by far #1 in revenue.
Right? lol
Seriously, who actually bought this thing?
Maybe ¥5,000 to a die-hard collector (´^ω^｀;)
So he'd make them out of private photos?
He's a unicorn in MLB, plus he's good-looking and popular.
Wait, is that Ohtani himself posting?
Is it because he didn't go on the ground ball?
His baserunning really is bad though.
There's no way you could've run on that.
Japan national soccer team captain Wataru Endo's limited-edition cleats at ¥330,000: zero buyers
¥0
Isn't that a bit much, even so?
Wonder which one ends up worth more.
Most of it's probably just speculation/investment.
and seeing that a Pokémon card went for ¥2.5 billion made this whole thing feel even more absurd.
Rich people's whims are wild.
Pokémon >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ohtani (lol)
They turn literally everything into an investment vehicle and just play around with money.
There's no way a mere card is actually worth that much.
The moment everyone loses interest, it'll be worthless.
That case is an outlier among outliers.
The card itself is extremely rare, sure, but on top of that the owner is a famous influencer in the West who hyped it on his own stream, and his followers ended up bidding against each other — the price just got pumped up as far as it could go.
Nah, no way.
There's no Japanese person dumb enough for that.
tps://www.nikkansports.com/m/baseball/mlb/news/202606300000583_m.html
Just split it up and give it to everyone — we'd all be happier.
That's not how it'd work
Prices would just go up.
Not within the "Topps NOW" series, anyway.
Background and Key Points
Ohtani’s card belongs to Topps NOW, a “print-to-order” format that started in 2017: instead of a fixed print run, Topps releases a new card within 24–48 hours of a real, specific game event and only prints however many copies are ordered in that short window, then closes it forever. That scarcity mechanic — plus this card marking the first unassisted “50-50” (50 home runs, 50 stolen bases) season in MLB history — is why a single signed card cleared $686,250 (~¥110 million), reportedly a record for the series and enough to top signed cards of NBA stars LeBron James and Steph Curry. It’s worth noting Ohtani also holds the separate all-time public-auction record for a baseball card at ¥410 million, for a rookie card sold earlier in 2026 — so this ¥110 million figure is specifically the Topps NOW/signed-card record, not his overall high-water mark.
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t really about Ohtani — it was about whether any trading card can rationally be worth that much money at all. One camp treated the price as pure financialization: cards, like the ¥2.5 billion Pokémon sale posters kept invoking, are speculative assets whose value depends entirely on continued hype rather than the object itself. The other camp just found the number viscerally absurd — “a piece of paper” — without engaging the investment logic.
What the thread missed is the mechanism behind that Pokémon comparison it kept citing: that sale wasn’t organic scarcity but a Western influencer publicizing his own purchase and livestreaming it, which pulled his fanbase into a bidding war against itself. No poster connected the dots on whether Ohtani’s sale had a similar promotional engine behind it, or was closer to genuine collector demand.
This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Breaking News+) thread “[MLB] Shohei Ohtani’s Limited Card Sells for All-Time Record ¥110 Million — Signed Card Surpasses LeBron and Curry.”
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