David Garry and his son were making their biggest purchase ever. They just didn’t know how big yet.
David, 43, had gotten back into collecting sports cards in 2020, and 12-year-old Jax was now prime age for the hobby. They’d rip packs of cards and talk about players old and new; Jax, a travel-team baseball player himself, got into players his dad liked in the 1990s. It’s their thing now. The whole experience, as David described it, sounds every bit as wholesome as a hobby like card collecting could be. It sounds magical.
“He'll go and watch videos of these players,” David said, “like ‘Best Plays of Ken Griffey Jr. Ever.’ Just introducing him to those old players from my childhood is more important than finding a Griffey Star Rubies. It's him getting to know the players that I used to know and love.”
That “Griffey Star Rubies” is an insert card from the 1999 Skybox Premium set. There has been a recent surge in collector interest in that particular subset. An April headline read “The Forgotten Gem: Why Skybox Star Rubies Deserve More Respect in the Hobby.” Someone outside the hobby might think that these cards are pretty respected already. The first time David and Jax purchased someone’s old card collection, they literally found valuable jewels. David sold a 1999 Will Clark Star Rubies card, numbered 50/50, for $2,000 last month. If you need a sense of how heated the market for these cards is, consider that an eBay listing that began “calling all Will Clark fans!” led to a man receiving $2,000 in return for one baseball card. This is not necessarily more magical than getting your 12-year-old into Ken Griffey Jr., but it seems up there with taking your kid to Disney World.
The pair also found a Griffey Star Rubies, a card that’s currently out for grading. Last year, an 8 grade of that card sold for $16,100. David and Jax continued to buy old cards in bulk through online marketplaces occasionally. Their first box cost them $450, and they’d go $50 higher on a cache of 60,000 cards from a seller David found online.
Buying in bulk has one major downside: The people you’re buying from may have picked through the cards already and taken any valuable cards they spotted. This happened with their first buy; someone had gone through and grabbed all the Michael Jordan cards. David was aware of this, but he did a cursory check of the seller’s online profile. Nothing seemed an obvious scam.
David and Jax took a 90-minute drive to meet the seller on that 60,000-card lot, paid him 500 bucks, and loaded the cards into the car. That’s when David saw the name “Greg Briley.” He saw “Greg Briley” again. Then he saw it again and again and again. He looked closer. David and his son then had the following conversation:
David: Jaxson?
Jax: What?
David: All these boxes are Greg Briley!
“I put the car in park and I went and opened up all of the boxes to see if I had gotten screwed on this deal,” David said. “And these cards look pristine. I’m talking fresh. It wasn’t like somebody ripped a bunch of boxes and then amassed this set. It was like somebody went and got these Greg Briley cards fresh off the production line and put ’em instantly in the box, and they’ve never seen the light of day.” In all, he said there were 10,400 Greg Briley cards.
Do I need to explain how magical this is? A man and his son bought 60,000 baseball cards, and about a sixth of those were of one player. Not just that: They were cards of a player who was a promising rookie on the 1989 Seattle Mariners—a team that also featured Ken Griffey Jr., who also has an iconic rookie card from that same season.
Griffey’s card was No. 1 in that set, which put it in the upper-left corner of the 100-card print sheet. That spot made it more likely to be damaged when the sheet was cut. Because Upper Deck replaced damaged cards, people would inevitably send in that hyped card if it had a bent corner. “Eventually you’re going to run out of Griffeys,” former Upper Deck executive Jay McCracken said in Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition. “So there were sheets printed with just a hundred Griffeys on them.” There have been rumors of sheets or boxes of pristine Griffey rookies for decades.
To David, these cards seemed like a bizarro version of the idea of printing a full sheet of Ken Griffey Jr. rookies and storing them away for posterity. The cards were all perfect. The overall impression was as if someone in 1989 had a hazy vision that someone on the 1989 Mariners was going to be an all-time great, then took an extremely long investment position on the wrong guy.
Griffey went on to have a Hall of Fame career where he hit 630 homers and amassed 83.8 WAR over 22 seasons. His 1989 Upper Deck rookie goes for around $40 ungraded, ranging up to $4,500 for a 10 grade. Briley’s 1989 season was the best in a career where he hit 29 homers and amassed 0.3 WAR over five seasons. His 1989 Topps rookie has sold three times this year, most recently for 25 cents. David has 10,400 of them.
David went through the boxes at home that night. The binders had been picked clean, except for a few Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire cards. He was determined to find one more interesting card. It wasn’t happening. “Every time I opened up a box,” he said, “it was just this Greg Briley man.”
Father and son aren’t too upset about the situation. They’re now having fun figuring out what to do with 10,400 Greg Briley baseball cards. Jax is an artist, too, and he’s coming up with what he can do with a canvas of a few thousand baseball cards. David wants to get some of the cards graded and is noodling on ideas for using the bit of virality he’s currently enjoying to raise money for charity through an auction for a Greg Briley 1989 Topps 10 GM MT card (or, as I suggested, 10,000 Greg Briley 1989 Topps 10 GM MT cards).
Greg Briley stayed in baseball after a five-year career, most notably as a coach in the White Sox organization. I wanted to get in touch with him to talk to him about this story, but I couldn’t reach him. It was as if he knew I was going to ask him silly questions. But I’m going to try again. Who knows how much more magical this story could get?
