Bass: What’s an Elly De La Cruz or a Joe Burrow rookie card worth? It’s show time.

ROSEMONT, Ill. ­– When Joe Burrow was carted off the Cincinnati Bengals practice field last week, word traveled here as fast as Elly De La Cruz flies off the display cases at the annual National Sports Collectors Convention.

When you have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands invested in a current player’s card, you pay attention.

Now what?

Do you wait it out? Sell fast out of panic or caution? Buy low and hope to sell high?

“I bought a bunch of Burrows, one for 60 percent of what it brought in the last sale,” KK Sportscard owner Kyle Kania founder said the next day. “It had gone for ($)1,100, and I paid 650. I can easily get a thousand for it.”

This is the risk and reward of playing the memorabilia market with players who could soar to lasting superstardom or fade into mediocrity or obscurity.

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That will not happen to Joe Burrow. Right? The injury turned out to be a strained calf, and he should be back by the season opener. Right? His card still is valuable. Right?

And what about Elly De La Cruz? What are you willing to spend on the immediate sensation, who is two months into his Reds career, who has struggled since the All-Star break, who should return to his dominant ways. Right?

And how long are you willing to wait to find out?

Part investment, part waiting game

Check out the Elly De La Cruz card Kania pulled out of his display case for me. $triking. Awe$ome. $weet.

This was a 2022 Bowman autographed card, a gold refractor chrome card, one of 50 produced of this particular model, and graded the coveted 10 by PSA.

Any idea what it’s worth?

In June 2022, it sold on eBay for $5,000. Ludicrous, you say, for a player a year away from a Cincinnati debut?

But don’t you wish you had paid it at the time?

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Kania steered me to the Card Ladder app, to search for some recent sales of other PSA 10s of that card:

May 8: $7,689.

May 28: $9,100.

June 7 (the day after De La Cruz’s debut): $12,000.

June 29: $16,650.

July 17: $22,100.

July 27 (a day earlier): $23,000.

“I’ll probably ask for about $25,000,” he said.

That is not even the La Cocoa record.

EBay sales show a different type of 2022 Bowman card going for $41,999 on July 1. Card Ladder does not list that one, instead leading with a June 24 eBay sale of an even different 2022 Bowman for $40,000.

Either way, imagine if he leads the Reds to the World Series.

Did you see what happened to Burrow’s cards when he led the Bengals to the Super Bowl?

Investments can skyrocket based on performance

Let’s flash back to 2022.

Between the AFC title game and Super Bowl, Goldin Auctions offered a number of Burrow cards. A week earlier, PWCC Marketplace had sold one for a Burrow-record $220,000.

Stand back.

At 10:07 p.m. Feb. 5, Goldin sold a Burrow for $230,400. A record. For a few hours.

At 1:25 a.m. Feb. 6, Goldin sold another one for $534,000.

Ready for more?

Weeks later, Sam Nubani pulled a one-of-a-kind Burrow card. Before long, he was offered $500,000 for it. No, thank you. A week later, someone else offered about a record-breaking $550,000 to $560,000. Again, no thanks.

To Nubani, the best Burrow card ever pulled, the only one made of this version, warranted a bigger return, even with a BGS 8 grade. He listed the card on eBay for $990,000.

Shooting that high was a risk.

It backfired.

Interest and the economy waned in the offseason. Nubani expected another big season for Burrow, but the market was the market, and sometimes you surrender. After spending upwards of $30K each on the 10-15 cases he had bought to pursue a card like his Burrow, Nubani wanted to ensure a good return. So he partnered with Goldin, hoping to at least approach the $500,000 he had initially declined. But bidding was disappointing at first.

A day before that auction ended, the market was rocked.

Another one-of-a-kind Burrow was pulled. Word spread of a seven-figure deal. Nubani hoped the buzz would boost interest in his card. In the end, a few late bids pushed the final total to $336,000.

When I contacted him two days later, Nubani

graciously congratulated the auction winner but understandably regretted not taking one of the early offers.

“That’s why timing is so important, to be able to sell at the right time when the player is at peak level or wins few games in a row or playoffs etc.” Sam wrote. “For example, I think if the auction ended a day or day later, I might (not) have gotten the 336k. Because he played poorly yesterday (in the Bengals’ opening game). And in the hobby you’re only as good as your last game.”

The day Nubani and I texted, the sale of that newfound Burrow card was announced . . . at $1.7 million.

It more than tripled than that record $534,000 sale.

So should Nubani have waited? Burrow and the Bengals did rebound and reached the AFC title game again.

Still, the $336,000 remains the third-biggest sale of a Burrow card, according to Card Ladder.

So has the market slowed on Cincinnati’s football savior? Would you bet your money on that?

Will it slow for Cincinnati’s baseball sensation? Would you put your money on that?

Elly De La Cruz memorabilia can be hard to find

Elly De La Cruz figured to be everywhere at this five-day extravaganza in suburban Chicago.

Or at least somewhere.

“Elly, it’s hard to find right now,” said Hollywood Collectibles assistant manager Brian Dolan.

Ask Brian Kong. The artist has drawn comics for MLB and the NBA, and his illustrated player cards went for $100 each here at The National.

“I had two of Elly,” he said. “They sold before the show opened.”

VIP ticket holders get in early and pounced on Day 1.

Yes, Elly De La Cruz is here. Just keep looking.

One dealer I met told me he came to the show with five relatively affordable De La Cruz cards, bought three more of those, and now on Day 2 had one left, a PSA 10 that he had bought 20 minutes ago and was selling for $200.

Want to know how popular that card is?

The 2022 Bowman Chrome Prospects BCP50 was traded more than any other graded De La Cruz card (1,224 times) in the last 12 months, according to PWCC research. Its average price rose 81.4 percent to $145.

And if that still seems too high, there were numerous $5 cards available, too, if you kept exploring. The show and the industry are about more than the biggest spenders. A card can let you share the joy every time you look at it, whether slabbed or not, whether you track the value or not. De La Cruz’s highly anticipated debut electrified baseball, meeting if not exceeding the high expectations.

Graded De La Cruz cards overall are up 75.8 percent in the past year, according to PWCC. Even a post-All-Star break slump did not deflate interest among the show-record 100,000-plus people here. It is too soon for that.

“He’s the hottest guy here in baseball besides (Shohei) Ohtani,” said Chicago dealer Cano Virella.

Which means Cincinnati sports now has two of major-league sports’ most popular figures.

Because Joey B remains a big commodity.

Joe Burrow ranked with NFL elite quarterbacks

Signs of Joe Burrow were all over the show. Burrow cards. Burrow helmets. Burrow jerseys. Burrow photos. Burrow is a Fanatics-affiliated player, and Fanatics is a dynamic and growing presence in sports collectibles, from marketing its players, to buying Topps and PWCC, to planning Comic-Con-type events.

The NFLPA just listed Burrow as No. 3 in NFL jersey sales from March through May of this year, behind fellow quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes (the Super Bowl champ) and Aaron Rodgers (the new Jet).

No huge surprise there.

Burrow ranks fourth in the football “trading card space” over the past 12 months, according to a PWCC algorithm looking at trade volume and price. He trails Tom Brady, Mahomes and Justin Herbert.

That might be a little surprising.

Burrow’s card value is down 2.9 percent over the past 12 months, via PWCC data.

That might be a little more surprising.

But Burrow is in line for the biggest contract in NFL history, ESPN and the Athletic both ranked Burrow as second only to Mahomes among NFL quarterbacks today, and it’s not like another year of training-camp injury drama will cause high-end collectors to go pennies-on-the-dollar for every high-end Burrow card out there. Not yet, anyway.

Nubani did not blame Burrow’s burst appendix in training camp last season for lowering the price on his card. It certainly didn’t affect the $1.7 million card.

And KK Sportscards’ Kania has a Burrow card that, if he is right, could move ahead of Nubani’s and into the top three.

“I just got potentially a $500,000 Burrow card back from PSA,” he said. “Now it’s the only one with a 10.”

BGS had graded the card a 9.5, and sending it to another company can be a risk, because what if the grade comes back lower? The record sale for the card was $156,000 in August 2022, also graded a 9.5 by BGS.

“Going up that half-grade could be up to a three-times multiplier,” Kania said, although that might be high.

Even if it tops $400,000 or even $300,000, that could reflect well on the market and on Burrow.

Of course, taking the Bengals to another Super Bowl wouldn’t hurt, either.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Joe Burrow, Elly De La Cruz rookie card values at NSCC show