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Jimothy card at Seattle Mariners game
The Seattle Mariners handed 20,000 fans a free baseball card earlier this month, and one 13-year-old might leave the promotion with enough money to buy a pretty respectable used car. The best part is that the player pictured on the card has zero career hits, zero MLB service time, and is, technically speaking, a raccoon.
A fan named Abby received the one-of-one gold rookie card of Seattle internet celebrity Jimothy during the Mariners’ Aug. 5 giveaway and subsequently put it on eBay. According to MyNorthwest, bidding had already climbed to close to $17,000 on Saturday, with the auction still scheduled to run through Sunday.
Jimothy Has A Better Rookie Card Market Than Actual Baseball Players
This entire sentence would have required medical attention if you tried explaining it to a baseball-card collector six months ago.
The Mariners gave rookie cards to the first 20,000 fans entering T-Mobile Park for their Aug. 5 game against Detroit. Most received the regular Jimothy card, but Seattle turned the promotion into a legitimate chase product with parallels numbered to 2,000, shiny blue versions out of 500, silver cards out of 100, and exactly one gold one-of-one.
Abby got the golden ticket.
On Tuesday, 68 bids had pushed the card to $5,400. About 24 hours later, 13 more bids had more than doubled the price to $12,300 (it’s sitting at $16,700 as of this writing).
Again, this was free.
You did not need to buy a $700 hobby box, enter a break, or spend six months arguing with strangers about PSA centering standards. Abby went to a Mariners game and was handed a piece of cardboard featuring a woodland animal.
Apparently that is now a five-figure financial event.
Jimothy Somehow Became A Seattle Sports Star
For anyone fortunate enough to have avoided this corner of the internet until now, Jimothy is a raccoon from Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood whose unusually short, rounded appearance and distinctive walk turned him into a viral celebrity this summer.
The Mariners quickly adopted him as an unofficial mascot. Jimothy appeared in the team’s in-game salmon race, won the thing and eventually inspired players to wear Jimothy shirts during batting practice.
Naturally, baseball cards followed.
The back of Jimothy’s rookie even contains a wonderfully serious scouting report. His throwing arm is listed as “all fours,” while the answer to whether he bats is essentially the most accurate player evaluation ever printed on cardboard: no, because he is a raccoon.
The promotion became such a hit that both Jimothy-themed ticket events sold out, and Seattle added a second night after the first disappeared so quickly.
The secondary market went nuts almost immediately too. Regular giveaway cards began selling for actual money, while the one-of-one became the obvious prize.
Now a 13-year-old is sitting on a bidding war that has already crossed $12,000.
There are actual MLB rookies whose autographs do not command anything close to that.
Jimothy has never taken an at-bat, cannot sign his own card, and probably spends portions of his evening investigating garbage cans. His rookie card is worth five figures.