[Editor’s Note: Today we have a fantastic piece on the (in)famous Paul Skenes rookie card, which is being auctioned for an ungodly sum of money. Our own Susan Freeman shares her thoughts on the saga of the card below. You’re going to really enjoy this one! — PH]
How Do the Debut Patch Baseball Cards Impact Baseball History?
by Susan Freeman
I have been following along with the Paul Skenes one-of-one Debut Patch card that is being auctioned. It was pulled at Christmas by a kid and the Pirates quickly made a not-so-impressive offer to buy it (two season tickets behind home plate for 30 years, a meet & greet, two signed jerseys, and a chance to sit with Skenes’ girlfriend in a luxury suite during one of Skenes’ starts).
Kid lives in Cali and doesn’t care about the Pirates enough to keep it. Especially knowing he was offered to put it in an auction. Plus you never really know how a career will play out. Best to get the money now and cash in while Skenes is still hot.
But hey, it was a dream pull. He wrote about pulling the card in his journal.
The card was a redemption card so Topps got it graded – surprise, surprise, it was a Gem Mint 10. This means to the non-collectors out there 10 for the card itself and 10 for the auto (autograph cards don’t get the usual four category grading). Yada, yada, yada – it is going to auction… A Fanatics Collect auction. Which has one truly redeeming aspect – Fanatics Collect will donate its cut from the sale to the LA Fire Relief Fund. In the first 24 hours the card shot up to $504,000. Here is the link for current bid. The two week auction ends March 20th. The highest Skenes card sold so far was a 2023 Bowman Draft Chrome Prospect Superfractor one-of-one (PSA grade 7, auto grade 10) for $123,220, And the most expensive 2024 Debut Patch card sold publicly for $75,000. But the collector community (and then some) have been talking about this one for over two months now, pretty much non-stop. The card has been on a white glove tour like the Stanley Cup even getting photographed with Skenes at the Super Bowl.
But that is NOT was this story is about! This card includes the actual Debut Patch Skenes wore in his FIRST MLB game. It was removed at the end of the game, authenticated, and given to Topps. So what does that mean? His debut jersey is now INCOMPLETE. Let’s say he does have a great career and maybe even makes it to the Hall of Fame. No complete, accurate debut jersey exists. All so Topps can make a card, get a shitload of publicity, and said card goes in some rich guy’s vault somewhere.
Most patches on baseball cards are produced in a few other ways. Game Worn from unspecified MLB game, means it is laundry – they found some ruined/worn jerseys that had a name on the back (but were not tracked) and they cut it up. Sometimes they are just event worn – which basically means they hand him a shirt, he puts it on, and then takes it off. And sometimes they are completely manufactured just to make a pretty card. There was quite a scandal a while back with cards made from bought jerseys and currently a few cards have been opened and found to be the wrong guy, but those seem to be human error, not a deceptive practice. None of those in that reddit post appear to be Topps. But these debut patch cards (which actually are MLB authenticated) have gotten pretty big. There were 91 in the 2023 Topps Chrome Update, and 251 in 2024. In contrast, the newly announced gold batterman patch cards do not impact this discussion because they are not necessarily from specific milestone jerseys.
So does sticking a patch on a debut jersey that really isn’t supposed to be there and taking it off to put on a baseball card really matter? Did they set that jersey aside or did Skenes keep playing in it? Do museums and Hall of Fames tend to care more about milestones in those jerseys instead of the first game played? And is that just because it is the nature of the beast because back in the day debut jerseys were not saved? Do we just take that jersey from a milestone later in the year when it wouldn’t have a debut patch on it anyway? Or just call it his Rookie of the Year jersey? Maybe there is no difference to most whether it is his “Rookie” jersey or “MLB debut” jersey. The Ohtani jersey below is from his first homestand – can we assume it is not debut jersey? There are after all so many milestones in baseball and when you see one hanging in a museum you don’t really think about all the ones that aren’t there.
The Baseball Hall of Fame has a Babe Ruth jersey in which he never even played an official MLB game. There is a wide variety of jerseys in the Baseball Hall of Fame – and many from guys not in the Hall too. I would rather have Nolan Ryan’s 5,308th strikeout jersey than his first (because I hand numbered all 5,308 First Edition copies of the Nolan Ryan Authorized Pictorial History limited edition book) in 1991. Or should it be the 7th no hitter – or maybe his 5th no hitter when he was an Astro? Neither of those are cemented in my memory unfortunately. So why do we choose one over another? A memorable milestone or… most likely some personal connection.
But what if that jersey you picked was missing a patch? I am a purist with things like this and think now the jersey is incomplete and less than it should be (if it were displayed as his “MLB debut” jersey). But again I am asking you – does it matter? For example, those Jordan and Kobe NBA premiere game jerseys look pretty old and kind of gross. You an see another name under “Jordan” from where they recycled a jersey (which of course was how they did things back then). So would it matter if their was some baseball card patch missing? Maybe not.
Are baseball cards ruining the history of baseball? Or are they finally helping baseball popularity again? Give me your two cents.
Can’t afford the pack of cards that a potential gold mine is waiting for me to open. I was the guy in 1986 that thought baseball cards were going to send kids to college. A Mariner fan no less.
Baseball card collecting has turned into the lottery. I supposed that makes sense in a culture where gambling permeates everything. I buy a few packs every year just to have the new designs.
My nephews have reached the age where they are into cards and collecting, but are still too young to understand the money side of it and all the pulling aspects. I took them to a card shop, and as someone who hasn’t paid attention to cards since I was a kid in the early 90s, I was also shocked how much it has changed even since the collecting boom in my youth.
On the flip side I enjoyed watching my nephews 9 and 7, open cards because all they were really interested in was if they got players that were good or they liked, and if was a cool looking special card. The innocence in that was refreshing in contrast to the business side of it.
I think all kinds of cards are having a moment right now, look at the pokescalpers, so I don’t think this patch thing will last for long
I do think the whole patch thing is kind of dumb.
But… offering season tickets to someone who’s across the country? Might as well have just offered a pat on the head and a signed ball.
The list of reasons why I don’t follow baseball continues to grow.
My uncle had a business around trading cards. He could afford to with his cushy corporate management day job. He gave me a league set of NBA cards in 1990. I wish I had them now! Classic era players. Not for financial value but to remember those days of the NBA and the Dream Team. I love the sentimentality of cards but for him – and so many others – it is just a business.
It is indeed catering to the wrong of gambling that is so deeply ingrained in so many cultures. The fact that people from all over the world like to gamble does not make it a laudable custom. It is an addictive habit that ruins lives all around the globe. When does gambling stop being fun and it becomes a burden for everybody involved with the addict? Getting someone to gamble and exploiting that addiction is a crime in my book. Getting people sensitive to addiction to buy too many packs of cards by flaunting this potential moneymaker is exactly that. As for the kid who found the Skenes patch: Charlie and the Golden Ticket of the Wonka Factory. Hope it will do him well, either by selling it or by keeping it as a souvenir.
Error in the caption for the memorabilia photos: Ohtani wasn’t on the Dodgers in 2018.
Great point I overlooked. It should say first 2024 homestand.
Now fixed!
Wow this is a great article Susan! Thanks!
I don’t collect cards…I used to be given cards most Chanukahs as a child, but I didn’t even have organizing binders. I just stuffed them all in a shoebox. To me it’s all a bunch of cardboard. I don’t want to yuck people’s yums, and I’m VERY AWARE that people of all ages collect cards. But not me.
I DO, HOWEVER, collect game used stuff, so I think I’m qualified to have a thought-out opinion. I think it’s a ridiculous “tail wagging the dog” that MLB is mining money for Topps and Fanatics the auction house, but surprisingly, I’m not really offended by the debut jersey being “incomplete.”
Back in the old days, all the jerseys would get stripped down and sent to the minor leagues. I’ve seen Bill Henderson restore Joe Torre’s MVP Cardinals jersey, and also a Mickey Mantle Yankees jersey (might have been a MVP season jersey for Mantle too, I forget). For jerseys where nameplates are made separately to attach the NOB, it was very common to remove NOB’s to reattach to new jerseys. Still happens a bit today. We as a society (either as collectors, stewards of history, or maybe both) know better, and the proof is that the debut jerseys are still pretty much whole. If Paul Skenes eventually makes it to the Hall of Fame, I like that only he wears/wore his jerseys. All the nobodies on the Altoona Curve and the Bradenton Marauders can wear somebody else’s hand-me-downs.
One missing patch isn’t gonna ruin it for me. It’s still the debut jersey, and odds are I can photo match a jersey as “The One” without the Debut patch. (Meanwhile, not all leagues have a robust authentication system the way MLB does, but independent of the Debut patch and independent of photo matching to conclusively identify the debut jersey, a MLB authenticator probably got the assignment to authenticate Skenes’s debut jersey as duly worn on his MLB debut.)
And if you don’t like my reasoning on the patch, let me offer another hypothetical. If you think the debut jersey needs to be “as it was that day, for forever,” what if the player gets a grass stain or a dirt stain from diving or sliding or any other motion consistent with playing baseball? Is the equipment manager not allowed to put that uniform through the laundry machine? Funny enough, collectors pay more for dirty jerseys, but even a laundered jersey is still worn, so the story isn’t being ruined.
At the end of the day, I might be a collector, but I can’t collect anything if the players don’t play. They’re more important. It’s their stuff for as long as they or the team need their property. Aaron Judge’s debut bat (with a home run that day) is in Cooperstown, and Judge actually used it for at least four games. (Source: I looked at photos, and marks are distinctive. Photo matching!) Luckily the bat didn’t get shattered. On the other hand, George Brett’s “pine tar bat game” bat IS broken. The HOF wanted the bat on the spot, but Brett thought the bat was lucky. So George Brett used the bat until it broke, then gave it to Cooperstown with his signature and an inscription “this is the pine tar game bat.” Are we gonna pull every jersey out of circulation, so that players wear 162 jerseys per season en route to a Hall of Fame career? I sure hope not. That would annoy the players, and if you let the players play a bit, the artifacts gets a longer story, and that makes it more interesting for collectors!
TL:DR; As a person who wants to avoid Idiocracy in real life, the Debut patch is too shamelessly capitalistic for me. But aside from that, and purely as a collector who definitely has some archivist tendencies that other people might mistake for hoarding, this is small potatoes in my book.
Wow, thanks for the thought you put into your response. And all valid points.
I recoil in horror when I hear the phrase “Gem Mint 10.” There was an obnoxious late night baseball card huxter on a QVC’esque network that I always came across while doom scrolling through late night tv in the 90’s. It was a trainwreck of a production, usually pushing near worthless sets and individual cards. But everything was “GEM MINT TEN!!”, “GEM MINT TEN!!”, “ya’ gotta call in now…
This guy and the over production of baseball cards in the 90’s pretty much killed any enjoyment I had in the hobby. I can’t tell you the last time I even bought a pack of cards, yet I still have untold thousands of cards all meticulously arranged and boxed up in my office closet.
So this ugly patch that was defacing the jersey has now been removed, hurting the value of said jersey?
“The food at this restaurant is terrible!”
“I know— and such small portions!”
I couldn’t image paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, for a little piece of cardboard, but good for the the kid, though.
1.11 million…
Halls of Fame. Surgeons General, brothers in law.
How can you not be pedantic about baseball?
I know Lizzy Dunne is cute and famous but making her part of the offer seems creepy.
Olivia “Livvy” Dunne, not Lizzy
Good catch but know I think Lizzy sounds cooler than Livvy