The wild story of how Josh Luber acquired one of the rarest Ohtani cards

Yahoo

25-07-2025

Yahoo Sports senior MLB analysts Jordan Shusterman and Jake Mintz are joined by StockX co-founder and MLB card collector Josh Luber, who discusses the crazy story of how he acquired one of the rarest Shohei Ohtani trading cards. Hear the full conversation on the 'Baseball Bar-B-Cast' podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
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Video Transcript
I'm sure you have quite a crazy collection at this point of all of the baseball cards.
That you have with you right now.
Are there any that stand out as a favorite, sentimental, particularly notable?
I was buying Otani at the very beginning of him starting to come back and starting to get hot and people started to look at it.
I made a lot of money buying Otani early.
I bought and sold and sold, but there's one card that I will probably hold on to forever, and the story about this is extraordinary, so, and I don't know how how well you guys know cards, but so this is the Bowman Chrome number two 5 autograph.
So this is basically his second best card.
The only card better is gonna be the one of one, the Super Fractor, and I mean, this is, this is I don't know what this would go for on the market.
Maybe.
Maybe a million plus, like, I don't know.
I paid $30,000 for it.
But the story is even better, which is that I was, I was buying up Otanis at the time.
I was at a couple different car shows.
I was buying all the biggest Otanis in the room and I was just trying to accumulate them, and I met a kid, typical hustler kid who was just sort of like trying to help me find him.
He'd call me up and say, hey, this guy's got this guy.
So he found the guy who owned this card, and the guy was in Hawaii, and I live in Austin, Texas, and the guy in Hawaii, we made a deal, but he refused to ship the card.
He's like, you know, I was buying it for $30,000, which at the time was a fair market price, maybe a couple bucks high, and he says, Listen, this is the most money I've ever made in my entire life.
I pulled it out of a pack.
You know, he's like, I make $40,000 a year.
He's like, I'm not sending this in the mail.
There's this kid, this 23 year old, and I said, I'll pay you to fly to Hawaii.
I'll pay you for your vacation, stay there as long as you want.
He's like, I'm not sending this in the mail.
There's this kid, this 23 year old in the, I said, I'll pay you to fly to Hawaii.
I'll pay for your vacation, stay there as long as you want.
I'll pay.
You want to hang out there for a week, I'll pay for it.
Get the card and fly it back to me.
And he did.
So, you know, he figured out how to make it work, and this kid got a free trip to Hawaii out of it.
I'm laughing about that kid going through airport security in Honolulu and holding $50,000 in cash, too, right?
Because I had to give him cash to be able to go and buy it.
Can you imagine, man, you're like on the plane clutching, you're like holding to it like it's the nuclear football.
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