Pete Crow-Armstrong Cards Are on a Rocket Ship
Hey, Turns Out An MVP Run is Pretty Good for Your Card Market
Aug 26, 2026
Aug 26, 2026
Chicago Cubs
Patrick Gorski-Imagn ImagesAug 1, 2026; Chicago, Illinois, USA; Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong (4) celebrates after a score during the first inning against the New York Yankees at Wrigley Field. Mandatory Credit: Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images
Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images
There are always exceptions, but the card hype trajectory for a notable baseball prospect usually looks something like this: his first appearance – pretty much always Bowman Chrome at this point – gets a lot of attention when the set is released and folks start pulling/selling the raw cards. Then, his cards start getting graded, and, if he has stayed a notable prospect to that point, there’s a solid ascent in the value of his PSA 10s.
Eventually, you reach an inflection point: if the player has reached really significant prospect status – top-100 consideration, for example – and checks the other boxes collectors are looking for (on the younger side, position player, potential for huge offensive numbers, etc.), the prices on the player’s cards will climb further, as speculators try to either buy and flip on the way up, or buy ahead of a longer-term breakout for the player. It’s a nice move if you can catch it.
But, be careful. For 95% of those prospects, a significant dip follows. The modern prospecting market is so stratified that you see really outsized gains for the tip-toppiest of prospects/young big leaguers. So, once collectors start to feel like there’s an increasing chance that this particular prospect/young player probably won’t become one of Those Guys, they sell off. Even in a world where, to baseball fans, the guy is still a good and legit prospect/young player!
The Pete Crow-Armstrong Cards Market
For example? Back in 2024, Pete Crow-Armstrong cards saw their market steadily dip even as a 22-year-old establishing himself in the big leagues. By the time the calendar was turning to 2025, a whole lot of collectors were out.
Card Ladder has an indexing tool that shows the value of a player’s total market of cards. As you can see, PCA’s market followed the general trend early on, before dropping by more than 50% from mid-2023 to the fall of 2025:
The Hobby is harsh on young prospects and players who don’t immediately explode.
… Kind of a weirdly-scaled chart I shared there, though, right? Like, why all that space from 1500 to 4500 in the index when the price level never gets particularly close to most of it?
Ah, well, that’s because I cropped it, obviously!
So I could then show you what happened when PCA started to break out last year, and fully explode this year. Hey, there’s that 4500:
Hey, I guess pacing for the Cubs’ first ever 40-40 season is pretty good for your card market?
That’s a 5x to 10x movement in the Pete Crow-Armstrong cards market in two bursts, with the latter coming over only a very tiny window this year. That window? Almost exclusively THIS month, as collectors came to the realization that PCA had a very good shot at winning the MVP over The Hobby’s favorite darling, Shohei Ohtani.
The fluctuations in individual cards varies, of course – that’s what an index accounts for – but the story has been the same with all of them: if you got in before the two MVP-like stretches (first half of 2025, most of 2026), you are a very happy camper.
To look at one concrete example, there was a time when you could get PSA 10 Pete Crow-Armstrong 2020 Bowman Chrome 1st Sapphire Edition (a favorite of mine, even though Sapphire doesn’t get a ton of love in the hobby for whatever reason) for as little as $32. I know, because that’s what I got it for back in October of 2024. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, but it just felt to me like such a cheap price to pay for the chance that PCA could turn himself into a good big leaguer.
Clearly, I undersold the situation even myself. As you can see in the chart above, once PCA started putting up heroic numbers in the first half of 2025, his market took off. It flattened and fell a good bit as he went through the second half slump, and then fell further with his slow start this season. Indeed, you can see how dramatically things can change in the baseball card world – it was a few bad weeks to open the season, but to many collectors, it signaled that the promise of his early 2025 success was a mirage, and it was time to dump. Those folks really should’ve been studying the batted ball data and the plate discipline metrics, because, if you remember, they told a strong story long before PCA actually broke back out.
Anyway, fast-forward to today, and the Pete Crow-Armstrong cards market – like his performance – has gone nuclear. That same Sapphire PCA that I got for $32? A copy most recently sold for $650 last week.
The Ultra-Premium Tier of Pete Crow-Armstrong Cards
The high end of PCA’s market has told the same story, with numbered parallels showing those same kinds of 5x, 10x type moves. The really interesting thing, though, is that the very top of his market … hasn’t actually sold this year. Not the prices, mind you. I mean sales. The most expensive PCA card ever sold, according to Card Ladder, was a BGS 9.5 (auto 10) red parallel (/5) of his 2020 Bowman Chrome 1st, which went for $50,400 back in June of last year. His rookie (2024) 1 of 1 superfractors in Bowman Chrome and Topps Chrome went for $32,500 and $30,300, respectively, back in June and September of last year.
In other words, none of PCA’s ultra-premium cards has changed hands after his MVP turn this year. My guess is that the price tags would be absolutely eye-watering, and, for that reason, it might be tough for either side to pull the trigger on a sale.
The best idea we have on that top-of-the-market is a late-July sale of a copy of the red wave refractor (/5) of his 2020 Bowman Chrome 1st auto. It went for nearly $30,000 … RAW. A gold version (/50) in a PSA 10 went for $25,000 earlier this month. An orange (/25) in a BGS 9.5 went for $22,200 a couple weeks ago.
Those are the best proxies we have for what’s happening at the top of PCA’s market after his MVP breakout, and since these things are absolutely NOT linear, you might well be looking at $500,000+ if one of his best 1 of 1s were to hit the market now.
I’m actually kind of hoping one of the very best Pete Crow-Armstrong cards does come up for auction soon, just because I’m curious to see what (1) the story would be around its availability and his performance, and (2) obviously what the final gavel shows.
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Brett Taylor is the Lead Baseball Writer at Bleacher Nation. You can find him on X at @Brett_A_Taylor, on Bluesky at @Brett-Taylor, and on LinkedIn here.
Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.
