Which players have the most PSA graded tickets?

That is one answer. Michael Jordan has tickets from 1,165 separate moments under a PSA label, more than twice Mickey Mantle's 495, and Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Nolan Ryan, Gary Carter and Ted Williams fill out a top ten that reads like a baseball reference book. Tom Brady is not on it. He is fifteenth, on 224. Count the same census a different way, every graded copy instead of every ticket, and Brady is second in the whole hobby on 5,840. Both answers are correct. They measure different things, and which one you want depends on the question you are asking.

How are the most graded players counted?

Every figure in this post comes from the PSA ticket population census we took on 8 July 2026, the latest complete one: 284,367 graded copies across 72,544 catalogue items, re-read on 13 September 2026. For each item we take PSA's own graded total, which includes qualified grades the per-grade columns leave out. A player is credited with an item only when PSA's item name carries the full name. A bare surname never counts. That rule was tested and is deliberately conservative: surnames alone hand Ted Williams the Doug Williams Super Bowl, Gary Carter the Jimmy Carter inaugurals, Nolan Ryan the Ryan Leaf debut, and Sonny Liston every fight he lost to Ali and Patterson.

The cost of the rule is that it refuses labels which name a player by one word. "LeBron Passes Kobe" credits nobody, and 533 graded copies across 72 such items sit outside LeBron James's total; "MVP-Jordan" leaves 941 copies outside Michael Jordan's. Muhammad Ali is the one name it visibly undercounts, because PSA catalogues boxing by surname ("Ali vs. Liston"): he has 1,396 by full name and roughly 1,500 more on surname-only labels, which would place him seventh if they counted. They do not, because the same rule would credit Liston with the same fights. The inverse pass shows the list is otherwise complete: the largest item the rule rejects is the Woodstock three-day ticket at 2,063, which is not a person, and the largest rejected person is Deion Branch at 1,222, under Sandy Koufax's 1,878 in tenth place.

A moment is one event. PSA gives the full ticket, the stub and the pass of the same game separate population lines, and gives a Super Bowl one line per colour variant, so those lines are joined back into a single count for the second board. The boards rank players, not tickets: for the individual tickets PSA has graded most, see the most-graded tickets.

Who leads when every copy counts?

Jordan leads here too, and by more: 7,477 graded copies, 28% ahead of Brady. Six names sit on both boards (Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Mantle, Shohei Ohtani, LeBron James and, one place off, Koufax). The other four are the story. Brady, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter and Cal Ripken reach the top ten on graded copies and fall to fifteenth, nineteenth, sixteenth and thirty-eighth when each ticket counts once. What they have in common is a small number of tickets that were graded in very large numbers.

The Jordan total has its own explanation, which is volume across a career rather than one heavy ticket: his single most-graded moment, the 1992 Finals "Shrug" game, is 185 copies, 2.5% of his total, and 364 of his 1,165 moments exist as exactly one graded copy. Where those copies came from, and why 2022 mattered, is in Michael Jordan ticket prices.

Why is Brady second and fifteenth?

Because 1,273 of his 5,840 graded copies, 21.8%, are one ticket: Super Bowl XXXVI, Patriots 20, Rams 17, his first title. PSA lists it on eleven catalogue lines, five colour variants each graded as a full ticket and as a stub, plus a single media pass. The green full ticket alone is 515 copies. His second-largest moment is another Super Bowl, XXXVIII against the Panthers, at 724 copies and 12.4%. Add the rest of his Super Bowl wins and a handful of games account for most of a total that, spread across 224 moments, leaves only 52 that exist as a single copy.

Of the 545 Super Bowl XXXVI full tickets we hold in the scan database, PSA's own grade on the cert reads 10 on 119 of them, 9 on 176 and 8 on 101, so 72.7% sit at NM-MT 8 or better. They are unused, modern-stock souvenir tickets that were kept flat from the day they were printed, and grading them in bulk is cheap and low-risk. That is how one game produces more graded copies than most Hall of Famers' entire careers.

Cal Ripken is the sharpest version of the same pattern. 862 of his 1,926 copies, 44.8%, are his 3,000th hit on 15 April 2000, and of the 97 examples of that full ticket in our records, 50 are PSA 10. Shohei Ohtani's first home run on 3 April 2018 is 750 copies and 24.5% of his total, split across four catalogue lines; he holds fifth on copies and eighth counted once, the smallest fall of the four, because his 291 moments are already broad for a career that started in 2018 (his sixteen separate debut tickets are their own story).

Which players sit on one board only?

Gary Carter and Ted Williams make the point from the other direction. Carter has 572 graded copies, forty-fifth in the hobby, and 282 separate moments, ninth. 236 of those 282 moments exist as exactly one graded copy. Williams is 554 copies and 271 moments, of which 176 are singletons. Neither has a ticket that was graded in bulk; what they have is a long career in which somebody, somewhere, graded one ticket from a great many ordinary games. Hank Aaron sits between the two extremes: home run 715 is 495 copies and 31% of his total, but he still has 442 moments, fourth in the hobby, with 249 of them one-of-one.

Mantle is the only name that rises on the second board, from fourth to second, for the same reason as Carter: his biggest moment is 170 copies, under 5% of his total, and the rest is spread across 495 games. LeBron James holds fifth on both counts under this rule; our LeBron James population report reaches 393 moments by admitting the first-name-only labels this post refuses, which is the difference between the two figures.

Which count says who has the most PSA graded tickets?

Use the copies board when the question is about supply. It says how many slabs carry the player's name, which is what a seller competes against and what a buyer can choose between. Brady really is the second most-graded player in the hobby on that measure, and a Super Bowl XXXVI full ticket really does have 515 graded siblings in one colour. Use the counted-once board when the question is about breadth. It says how much of a career has been recorded under a PSA label, and on that measure a Gary Carter collection has more distinct history in it than a Tom Brady one, and Jordan's lead over everybody roughly doubles. Population figures are a point-in-time reading; they were as of 8 July 2026 and rise as more tickets are graded.