baseball · San Diego Padres · C · age 19 · about three years
This is the baseball entry for Ethan Salas: C for San Diego Padres, age 19. It sits alongside 81 other player entries in the picks tool.
Accessibility of 78 is what makes this interesting. The hobby hasn't priced the story in yet, and that is the only condition under which a high upside score is actually worth something to a buyer rather than to whoever already owns the cards.
Card upside (80) sits above the breakout score (46), which is the rarer shape. It means the cards look primed to react even though the step up in performance is less certain — usually because market size, playing style or an existing collector base is doing work the stat line isn't.
Set against the 14 baseball breakout picks scored here, its breakout of 46 ranks 14th of 14, card upside 80 ranks 9th, accessibility 78 ranks 1st, and risk 65 is the 13th-lowest. The closest thing to it on the numbers is Roman Anthony, which scores 54 and 80 on the same two axes — if you're weighing one against the other, the difference is in the reasoning rather than the scores.
Three years is long enough that current news is noise. You're buying a trajectory, and the main risk stops being performance and starts being changes in the hobby itself — what people collect, and what they've stopped collecting.
Risk at 65 is high and should be read literally. Entries this risky belong in the part of a collection you could write off without it changing anything about your year.
Every entry gets four separate scores instead of one grade, because a single grade hides the thing you needed. Full explanation in the guide: how to spot a breakout before the cards move.
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