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Miles Teller Just Scored $24,000 Worth of Baseball Cards on eBay

The 'Top Gun: Maverick' star talks eBay, his love for baseball cards and the time he scared a bunch of kids off a basketball court

By Oscar Hartzog

Oscar Hartzog

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July 22, 2022

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Before he was flying fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick, Miles Teller wanted to be a pro baseball player. Of course, Teller went a different route: “I hit a lawn gnome full of ecstasy in Project X with a baseball bat. So that was kind of the closest I think I’ll get [to pro baseball],” he tells Rolling Stone.

Although his dreams of the diamond may have been sidelined, Teller recently revisited his love for trading baseball cards: eBay tapped Teller to help launch its new vault, a climate-controlled, insured, and security-protected storage facility trading cards worth more than $500. Whether you’re buying sports cards or valuable game cards, traders can now buy cards online, have them authenticated by eBay, and store in the vault for safekeeping. You can head to eBay.com for more details on the state-of-the-art vault, and shop trading cards eligible for vault storage.

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Miles Teller with Chase Utley eBay

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To kick off the vault’s opening, Teller and Phillies legend Chase Utley picked out five baseball cards worth almost $24,000 to keep in the eBay vault, in front of an audience in downtown Los Angeles. “My dad and I would always get a box of cards for Christmas, and I bought and sold cards off eBay throughout the years,” says Teller. “So when they told me about this vault and the security that it provides hobbyists, as well as people doing it as an investment, I thought it to be a really, really great thing. I wish it existed sooner, to be honest with you.”

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Speaking to Teller at the card-buying event, the actor seemed genuinely passionate about the partnership with eBay. “I’ve been approached about a lot of different things that I could really care less about, and I don’t feel comfortable, like, selling things to people. That’s not something that I really advocate for,” says the Top Gun star. “But if it’s something that aligns with my own interests then I’m more than happy to do it, and card collecting is something that, like a lot of people, I started out with pretty heavily [as a kid] and got involved.”

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Teller and Utley select cards for the vault eBay

Teller is also in the process of bringing his love for baseball to the big screen, saying he recently purchased the rights to a baseball book to turn it into a series. “That’s a perfect world if I can get paid to pretend to be a baseball player,” he says.

Related: Miles Teller Talks New Role as Investor in Finnish Long Drink

Between movies, Teller plays just about every sport, including football (as seen in Top Gun: Maverick), basketball, and horseshoes — his favorite “sport”: “I’m a big horseshoes guy. I don’t think that counts as a sport but that’s like my that’s my, that’s where I really shine,” he says.

The Whiplash star even gets into pick-up games once in a while, recounting an awkward experience of joining a pickup basketball game: “Me and my buddy one time tried to join like a pickup basketball game, but all the kids were like 11 and I don’t think they knew who I was,” says Teller. “I think they were weirded out that these two very much adult guys wanted to play a game of basketball,” he says, laughing. “A lot of them ran except for some overgrown 13-year-old kid who’s just like, ‘I’ll play you.’ The optics probably didn’t look great because there was a playground.” Luckily, Teller says the paparazzi didn’t show up.

Teller’s most recent work is, of course, Top Gun: Maverick, which has become the ninth-highest grossing movie in domestic box office history since its release in May. But Teller says he didn’t experience the hype around the movie until months after its release: “My first time out in public [since the release] was in Tahoe for this golf tournament and I just got a lot of love [for Top Gun] and it’s really been a highlight for me,” he says. “I mean, the movie is probably gonna end up making as much as the total of all my other films combined. It is a juggernaut.”

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