Baseball Hall is the co-founding partner of Brian Lee, who has launched a sports card collecting platform that is likely to make a splash.
The outfit launched today with a somewhat unique and digitally-enabled approach to helping collectors sell, store, and verify their sports trading cards.
It is not an NFT play and you could see a future where digital trading cards are on the table.
The startup will send the cards back to the collector if they want them to be close to hand. There is another facet of the business. The outfit says that it will provide users with a faster and more transparent process through computer vision and machine learning They brought on a big name in artificial intelligence, for example, as an advisor, including the head of R&D at Google Cloud, as well as the head of research at snap and the head of visual computing at Yahoo!. It's a lab.
Arena Club will give a transparent graded report for every card it grades on the platform.
Sports Collectors Daily says the new outfit has a few cards up its sleeve. It costs $35 to grade a card and return it, or $25 to grade a card and sell it. Arena Club will charge a fee to the seller based on the cash value of the transactions.
When people were trapped at home during the Pandemic, they were looking to spend some of their money in the bank accounts, and that's what Lee and Jeter are trying to capture. The most famous card maker was bought by a sports apparel and merchandise company for $500 million. The deal to go public through a blank check company fell apart when the company lost a trading card deal with MLB.
There is a way to track the excitement around sports cards by looking at cards of the player. The highest price ever paid for a modern-day baseball card at the time was for a rookies card from the year 1898 by the Yankees' captain. One of his rookies sold for $185,000 in 2020. The record for the highest price paid for a card in mint condition was broken last year with the sale of a rookies card.
Arena Club may be challenged by the fact that sports card trading has become crowded and some cards are coming down in price. According to a report last month in The Athletic, high-end collecting is still robust.
While Lee is well-known in investor and founder circles, he's also become more of a known quantity off the baseball field. He co-founded The Players Tribune in the year after he retired from football. He was part of the ownership group of the baseball team. Since retiring from baseball, he has made numerous startup investments.
In May of this year, he didn't embrace social media as much as he would have liked.
He hasn't promoted Arena Club yet. When he does, tech investors and founders will be aware.
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