Ken Blaze-Imagn Images/Neville E. Guard-Imagn Images
Karl-Anthony Towns and Aaron Judge
Plenty of NBA players spend their money on cars, watches and houses. Karl-Anthony Towns apparently decided $900,000 was better spent on a piece of cardboard featuring Aaron Judge.
The New York Knicks star revealed himself as the buyer of Judge’s one-of-one 2026 Topps Chrome Back-to-Back MVP Dual Gold Logoman autograph card after it sold through Fanatics Collect for exactly $900,000. The auction listing shows the card received 37 bids before selling Friday night, making it the fourth-highest publicly reported Judge card sale ever.
Karl-Anthony Towns Is Building A Very Expensive Yankees Collection
There are worse purchases for a lifelong Yankees fan with NBA money.
Towns revealed the acquisition through his Big Bodegas collecting account before posting “ALL RISE” on X, according to Sports Collectors Daily.
ALL RISE 🗽 https://t.co/0ryS4MJ2ge
— Karl-Anthony Towns (@KarlTowns) August 31, 2026
The card itself celebrates Judge winning consecutive American League MVP awards in 2024 and 2025. It contains two game-used gold MLB Logoman patches, one from each MVP season, along with an on-card autograph.
There is also only one of them.
That tends to help the price.
Towns’ Yankees obsession is not exactly a secret. He previously explained that his personal collection leans heavily toward New York and that a 1933 Lou Gehrig card is among his prized possessions.
He has also become increasingly serious about the hobby itself, hosting card breaks and building Big Bodegas into something significantly more involved than an NBA player occasionally buying a cool rookie card.
Dropping almost seven figures on Judge is a pretty strong indication the training wheels are off.
Somehow $900,000 Only Ranks Fourth For Aaron Judge
Here is the even crazier part: Towns spent enough money to purchase several houses in parts of America, and he still did not crack the top three Aaron Judge card sales.
Judge’s 2013 Bowman Chrome Draft one-of-one SuperFractor autograph sold privately for $5.2 million in March, setting a modern baseball-card record at the time.
A 2025 Topps Chrome Dual Gold Logoman autograph featuring Judge and Shohei Ohtani sold for $2.16 million that same month.
Then a one-of-one 2017 Topps Dynasty Judge Logoman autograph sold for $1.95 million in April.
Those three sales put Towns’ $900,000 pickup fourth on the publicly reported Judge leaderboard, as Sports Illustrated detailed while tracking the Yankees superstar’s increasingly ridiculous market.
And $900,000 is still $900,000.
Towns is essentially spending superstar-athlete money collecting another superstar athlete, which is a fun reversal of how the memorabilia world normally works. Somewhere, there is probably a wealthy Yankees fan spending a fortune on a rare Karl-Anthony Towns card while Towns is bidding against him for Judge.