This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 11/12/2021
Now officially a Hall of Famer after having his ceremony postponed for over a year, Derek Jeter is not just another Yankee in a long list of pinstripers making his way to Cooperstown but ranks with Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle as "Big Apple" legends that helped make the franchise the most successful in American sports history. Unlike the icons before him, Jeter wasn't a mammoth home run hitter, though he did show some pop in his bat with 260-lifetime round-trippers. Jeter's status as a Yankee immortal comes from a consistently exceptional body of work, ranking #6 all-time with 3,465 hits and earning the nickname "Mr. November" by hitting .321 over 38 World Series games. Most importantly, Jeter revived a Yankees franchise that had earned an unfathomable 33 American League pennants and 22 World Series Championships going into 1995 but hadn't held up the trophy since 1978. When it came time for Hall of Fame voting, Jeter received 99.7% approval, just one vote shy of a unanimous selection. While he appeared in several baseball card issues from 1993-95 that many consider “rookie” cards, his 1993 SP foil issue is the most coveted for its combination of visual aesthetics and sheer scarcity, with GEM MINT examples severely difficult due to the vulnerable nature of the borderless foil edges. The card featured here has hit the mark, a virtually flawless PSA 10 specimen that earned its status well before collectors started buying up unopened boxes in a frenzy to find that next diamond in the rough. Because of the limited production of the SP series and the reflective foil that exposes any and all flaws, the number of 1993 SP Jeters that have reached the summit is a mere 21 examples. That's out of almost 20,000 SP Jeters graded by PSA, roughly one out of every 1,000 submitted to PSA. The 1993 SP series contains 290 cards, but over 70% of all cards from the set that have been submitted to PSA are of Derek Jeter, a tribute to the most coveted production of the last 30 years and one of the greatest of all-time. As for the card, you'd be hard-pressed to find any flaw whatsoever, projecting virtually perfectly right to the very tips of the endpoints. The surfaces are immaculate and, when viewed in person, you know immediately that this example is truly something spectacular. With a museum-quality piece like this, there's no such thing as a vintage collector or modern collector. To any collector, it's simply a masterpiece!