#The baseball card market is thriving thanks to COVID-19

Forget the anxiety of the stock market, savvy investors are looking to Mickey Mantle.

Baseball cards are a safe, reliable way to grow your investment portfolio, according to a new report, the Daily Mail reported.

And it’s all about blue-chip names like Yankee legend Mantle.

In 1988, a mint-condition Mantle rookie card sold at auction for just $3,300 – 30 years later, the price for a mint-condition Mantle rookie jumped to a whopping $2.8 million, according to PWCC Marketplace.

“The market’s just on fire,” PWCC director of business development Jesse Craig told the DailyMail.com. “We’re very fortunate to be in the business that we’re in right now during a pandemic and still be thriving.”

Part of the steady market is the fact that cards have a limited supply and hold great emotional value — so will always be in demand and the blue-chip cards have steadily outperformed blue-chip stocks.

PWCC’s index of the top-performing 500 cards based on auction prices has a return on investment (ROI) of 216% compared to just 135% for the S&P 500 since 2008, according to the Daily Mail.

And the market took off this year especially due to COVID-19.

“I think it was kind of this perfect storm this year with coronavirus,” Craig told the Daily Mail. “Everybody’s sitting at home with time on their hands. … They started going through their old stuff, got reinvigorated, started paying more attention.”

But not everyone is as bullish.

“I don’t think that sports cards are a safer bet than the stock market or Wall Street,” noted entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk told the Mail. “I think that in the super-premium, top 3% of sports cards, they will outpace the stock market over the next several decades. … I think the scarcity at the super-premium — cards [with] less than a thousand in a perfect grading case or production — are very, very attractive pieces of art that have huge potential to outpace blue-chip stocks.”