Guardians top pick Travis Bazzana highlights new partnership between PSA and MLBPA

The Cleveland Guardians are hanging on for dear life in the AL Wild Card race with some particularly brutal series coming up that will likely make or break their 2025 season. As a result, fan interest in what the Guardians are doing is incredibly high at the moment. As a result, the timing of a new partnership between PSA and MLBPA that features a couple of young Guardians players including Travis Bazzana couldn't come at a better time.

For the unaware, the sports card collecting hobby may be at an all-time high right now outside of the craze during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Fans want good cards of their favorite players and investors are chasing the super rare cards as a new form of investment. Just this past spring, the chase card of the year, Paul Skenes' 1/1 rookie debut patch auto, sold at auction for $1.11 million. While this new venture probably won't result in a seven-figure card sale, it will have plenty of heat to go around for the collectors that have a good bit of spare cash laying around.

News broke Monday that PSA and MLBPA were launching a new auction called the Players Collection. On September 30, fans will be able to bid on some pretty high end cards that were opened on video by some of their favorite players and that includes Bazzana as well as Guardians pitcher Triston McKenzie.

Travis Bazzana and Triston McKenzie among players who took part in the Players Collection, a new collecting partnership between PSA and MLBPA

This is a pretty cool concept. How the Players Collection works is that a bunch of MLB players were invited to come and open some really high end card products on camera including Topps Definitive, Topps Diamond Icons, and Topps Luminaries. Other than Bazzana and McKenzie, some of the players involved included Justin Turner, Corbin Carroll, Zach Neto, and Bobby Witt Jr. From the cards opened, 60 were selected to be graded and put in the auction. Each card will come with a unique video of the card being opened and any reaction the player(s) had.

From the above trailer, McKenzie clearly opened some big cards, although exactly what he opened was kept secret for now. As for Bazzana, he opened an insane Miguel Cabrera 1/1 that featured a giant patch of the Marlins' older (and far superior) logo. To find out all the cards that McKenzie and Bazzana opened and had selected for the auction itself, you will have to check in again once the auction goes live at the end of September.

While a lot of these cards are going to go for quite a lot of money, this is a fun layer to add to high end card collecting. Not only are collectors going to be chasing specific cards, but they will also be getting the certification and memory of a MLB player opening that exact card. We'll see how often these auctions happen and which new faces take part when they do, but Cleveland fans certainly have some auctions to keep an eye on, especially the cards that Bazzana cracked.

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