Key Takeaways
• Gold MLB Insignia: Six MLB award winners will wear special gold MLB insignias on their jerseys this season. Fanatics and Topps will authenticate and turn 10 jerseys worn by each award-winning player into “Gold Logoman” trading cards at the end of the season.
• Value in Tangible Products: The collaboration highlights the enduring value of physical memorabilia over digital assets, with Fanatics also offering replica Gold Logoman jerseys for fans.
• Fanatics’ Strategy: Fanatics acquired Topps for $500 million in 2022 and is leveraging this acquisition to create unique memorabilia, blending apparel with trading cards.
Baseball fans might notice something new on MLB jerseys this season. No, we don’t mean see-through pants or weirdly small numbers, like last year. It’s subtle, but the six winners of 2024 awards like AL/NL MVP, Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young will have a special gold MLB insignia on their jerseys.
It’s a bit like how the winners of the previous Premier League season (England’s top soccer league) have a gold logo on their shirts the following year, and it feeds into a season-long promo from Fanatics that will draw in the Topps trading card division it acquired for $500 million in 2022.
Over the course of the season, 10 jerseys worn by each award-winning player, including Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes and Aaron Judge, will be authenticated by the MLB and turned into trading cards at the end of the season. They’re called “Gold Logoman” cards, which honestly sounds a bit like a placeholder name in the planning meetings that the team never got around to changing.
Two-Tool Player
When Fanatics acquired Topps, NFT’s (non-fungible tokens) were still all the rage in sports “memorabilia” and collectibles. The assumption at the time was that Fanatics might use the trading cards division to complement digital assets, or create digital versions of trading cards as print was phased out in favor of “cards” on the blockchain.
The hype around NFT’s has cooled considerably though, and this shows that there’s enduring value in tangible products. Furthermore, the Gold Logoman initiative highlights the connection between apparel items and print products.
Fanatics is also making replica versions of the Gold Logoman jerseys for fans to buy. Having that special logo for this season creates a time capsule promo where fans can celebrate their favorite players being the reigning titleholder for the game’s most prestigious individual honors, and resets that clock next year with a new batch of players (except maybe Ohtani, unless he and this Dodgers megateam really underperform).
Value in Print
The Gold Logoman efforts is a continuation of something the MLB and Topps already had in place called the “Debut Patch” series. As of this writing, the Paul Skenes debut patch card, pulled by an 11-year-old boy in California, is up for $550,000 at auction, according to The Athletic. With the auction house’s buyer premium, the buyer would have to pay as much as $660,000 for it.
So, yes, there is value in a printed memento.
Distributors can see these sorts of promotions – because that’s what they are – and find inspiration for their own customers outside of the professional sports world.
Maybe there’s an opportunity to take other pieces of apparel – such as uniforms for a local fire department – and create another commemorative piece like a plaque or a printed award that incorporates apparel. Or, pairing an apparel giveaway with a printed card explaining the eco-friendly materials used in the garment. If the card has its own eco-friendly properties, like being printed on biodegradable paper with plant seeds embedded in the fibers, that’s a bonus that completes the theme.
Perhaps you’re even in the sports world on a smaller scale, like a local Little League or similar youth sports organization. Taking pieces of previously worn jerseys, or even creating replicas, and printing them onto sports cards or other commemorative pieces for the players instantly becomes a keepsake they’ll treasure forever – or at least until they go off to college and their parents clean out their old rooms.
The point is that, at the end of the day, the patches and cards aren’t what fetches more than a half-million dollars. It’s the sentiment and emotions attached to them. Distributors can find ways to create an apparel promo that ties in with print to tell multifaceted stories that become something special.
