Michael Salfino

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Michael Salfino

An ultra-rare T206 Honus Wagner card is now on sale at auction, marking a milestone event for the sports card hobby. It's also an occasion circled by the very wealthy who want bragging rights and a small piece of 116-year-old art that's repeatedly proven to be one of the world's most lucrative investments.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Michael Salfino

Generally, hitters are correctly viewed as the back of their baseball cards. Any performance that deviates too far from that, especially regarding veteran hitters, is viewed as more of a fluke than a fact. Pitchers are different, given there are so many ways for them to radically improve or decline and sustain those new levels. Again, we should be skeptical when a player's hitting significantly changes. However, we now have new data: expected stats.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Michael Salfino

Velocity is the holy grail all pitchers chase in today's game. In pursuit of it, they may not risk their lives, but they quite literally risk their limbs. With the year-over-year stats at Baseball Savant, we can actually spot the extreme outliers in gains and dips in 2025 vs. 2024. The results question the whole scheme. They do not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that extreme changes in velocity significantly impact performance or even rise to a civil standard of preponderance of evidence.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Michael Salfino

There are many theories why the value of sports cards exploded during the pandemic but the fact itself is undeniable. The peak prices achieved then are viewed as an outlier, a bubble, something to be ignored when looking at the otherwise linear appreciation of vintage cards. But four years after that market peak of early 2021, that's not true for a subset of low-population cards of the long-retired athlete most identified with this period.

1 month ago | ripped.topps.com | Michael Salfino

May 14, 2025 Michael Salfino Baseball, Cards and Culture, MLB Nothing in sports sneaks up on us like the quarter turn in baseball. We go from, “It’s so early that these stats don’t mean anything” to, “Wait, the season is 25% over?” in what feels like a flash. With 40 games in the books, it’s time to assess how players vying for the major awards are performing. But actual stats are just one piece of the puzzle.