Collector Stories | Bryce Harper Super Collector

Inside Joshua Noble’s Fantastic Harper PC

Joshua Noble was at a gym about 15 years ago when he saw a kid hitting the weights hard. The 16-year-old told Noble he had aspirations of playing professional baseball. It was just four years later that Noble found out that teenager had made it to The Show.

Now, Bryce Harper has been one of the faces of baseball for the better part of a decade. 

“I had no idea who he was,” Noble said. “I just saw a kid busting his tail in the gym on a Saturday. I walked over to him and introduced myself. He was like, ‘Yeah, I want to play baseball.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that was my dream when I was younger, too. Just keep up the hard work.’ I had no idea that he was already on the cover of Sports Illustrated at that point.”

A Collecting Connection

Noble told Harper at the time that he would be watching to see if he made the big leagues. When he did, Noble picked up a reminder of his chance encounter.

“It was in between me coming back to collecting cards, so I picked up a Bowman Draft PSA 10,” Noble said. “It was super cheap at the time, like $13. I held onto it. I kind of started getting back into cards a little bit. I was like, ‘You know what, I’ll just stick with my true love, and I’ll collect this guy because I met him.’”

In October 2019, he started picking up seven or eight Harpers per week. “When I would get my Christmas bonus, I would hit it hard,” Noble said. “When I got my tax return, I would hit it hard.”

Now, Noble owns 3,900 different Harper cards as of the end of May. Collecting them has become an important aspect of his life since moving to Las Vegas about three years ago.

“When I lived in Oregon, fishing was my main thing and I collected cards when I was at home. There’s a lot of stuff to do (in Las Vegas), but there’s not a lot of stuff I’m interested in. So, it’s been mainly collecting cards.”

Noble’s Favorite Harper Cards

Noble — who likes to post his Harper cards on X, @jrnoble1 — doesn’t have any specific goals with collecting Harper cards. “I just enjoy it,” said Noble, who has about 150 1-of-1 Harpers in his collection. “Without the enjoyment, what’s the point? It’s a fun hobby.”

Noble’s favorite project involves putting together rainbows. He’s completed 18 Harper rainbows, most recently wrapping up the 2021 Topps Chrome Prismic Power insert.

Topps Triple Threads is Noble’s top product each year; he loves the photos used on the cards and the thick stock. Noble has completed Triple Threads rainbows from 2017, ’18, and ’23.

With 18 Harper rainbows in the books, Noble has another 50 in progress. For the 2021 Triple Threads product, he has three printing plates. The fourth has eluded him for three and a half years.

“That seems to be the hardest to actually pull off,” Noble said. “Right now, I have four rainbows I’m working on that I have three (printing plates) of. But I haven’t been able to actually put a full one together yet.”

What are Noble’s favorite Harper cards? “To be honest, it’s usually the newest one,” Noble said. “Well, Stadium Club has always been my favorite. The 2015 Stadium Club was the second PSA card that I picked up. It costs me $10, and to this day, I love that card. It’s the photo; it’s the design. Everything about it is just fantastic.”

This past Christmas, Noble purchased his first Harper booklet: the 2020 Triple Threads Jumbo Plus Autograph Relic Book /3.

Even with such a massive Harper collection, there are some cards Noble has been seeking for quite some time. He’s trying to finish up the 2021 Topps Finest Refractor rainbow. Noble owns the SuperFractor, but he’s still in search of the Purple/Pink Vapor /3 and Red /5. For 2021 Topps Chrome, Noble is missing just the Blue Wave /75 and Green /99 to complete the rainbow.

“One of the things that I enjoy is finding something that I’ve never seen,” Noble said. “It re-ignites the excitement.”

---

More Topps Collector Stories

---