Collector Stories | Ken Griffey Jr. Super Collector

Exploring Marco Bisio’s Iconic Griffey Collection

Date: Nov 26, 2025

Author: Greg Bates

Topics: Baseball, Cards and Culture, Collector Stories, Ken Griffey Jr., MLB, Trending

Length: 867 Words

Reading Time: ~5 Minutes

What Marco Bisio Jr. has done over the last 32 years collecting Ken Griffey Jr. cards is staggering. His unique card count of “The Kid” stands at 16,932, and he’s just shy of 30,000 total Griffey cards. But it’s not about which Griffey cards Bisio owns. It’s about which Griffey cards Bisio is still chasing.

“I have folders in my phone of photos of the cards I don’t have, broken down by year and by set,” Bisio says. “I also have photos of all the 1-of-1s that I don’t have, and the current owners, and where these 1-of-1s reside. It’s not just that I have a massive amount of Griffeys in my collection — it’s borderline obsessive.”

A Lifelong Project

Bisio, now 43 years old, was a Nolan Ryan collector during his early days in The Hobby. But that all changed in 1993 when Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. captured Bisio’s collector imagination with his pureness at the plate and grace in the field.

“I’m a junior, so that was part of it,” explains Bisio, who modeled his signature on Griffey and even played center field in high school like his idol. “I started collecting Griffey, only because I thought he was awesome. He wore his hat backwards.”

Bisio’s Griffey collection started off slowly when he was a kid. After he turned 15, he landed a job at a card shop within walking distance of his family’s house in Reno, Nevada.

“My collection really started soaring then,” Bisio says. “I remember 1996 through 1998 is really when I started buying packs, because I had a little bit more money. I’d get money for birthdays and I’d go to the card shop.”

Bisio recalls pulling a Greg Maddux Precious Metal Gems card in 1999; he quickly traded it to his LCS for Griffey cards. The obsession was real.

“At the end of 2002, that’s when I started collecting all those cards that I couldn’t afford,” Bisio says. “It was all those cards that I couldn’t buy in the ’90s. I was in college. I had a real job.” Picking up cards online opened up so more opportunities for Bisio to find big Griffey cards. By 2018, the collection had become truly massive.

“These cards were dirt cheap,” Bisio says. “Everybody wanted game-used stuff. Griffey kept getting hurt, so hardly anybody was collecting Griffey anymore and they were just offloading his stuff.”

Right before the COVID-19 pandemic, a couple of big-name Griffey collectors started selling off their cards. Bisio was able to snatch up some great pieces for his PC.

Thousands of Griffey Cards

Bisio says that owning 16,932 different cards of one player can be “a bit overwhelming.” He recently spent six months organizing and taking photos of all his Griffeys. Over the years, Bisio has conducted extensive research on his favorite baseball player.

“There’s not a thing I don’t know about Griffey cards and ’90s baseball,” says Bisio, who currently lives in Katy, Texas. “I have what I would call, I always laugh at it, a head full of useless knowledge that I wish would translate into something else.”

Of course, knowing the ins and outs of Griffey’s career is far more fascinating. These days, Bisio focuses his Griffey project on picking up cards from his playing days: 1987-2010.

“I only have 770 retirement Griffey cards, and there’s probably 15,000 cards that have been made of him since 2010,” Bisio says. “The 16,932 that I have are from 1987 until 2010.”

The Griffey Hunt Continues

Even with 17,000 different Griffeys, Bisio still enjoys the chase of finding big cards to fill the holes in his collection. “On my master list, I have a breakdown per year of which cards I’m missing,” he says. Bisio enjoys sharing his collection on his Instagram account, @tolkientmntgriffey24.

“It gets a little convoluted in the late 2000s with so many. For example, in ’96, I’m only missing two. In ’97, I’m only missing seven. Another example, like in 2000, I’m only missing 29 out of the 792 that exist.”

According to Bisio, 2,469 1-of-1 Griffey cards were produced from 1997-2010. He owns 224, or 9.1%, of those one-of-a-kind cards. The coolest ones in his collection are printing plates from the 2007 Allen & Ginter set. Bisio has two of the rarest 1990s Topps Griffey cards from his Mariners days, both coming from the 1998 Topps Stars product.

“They did four inserts in that set, but the two inserts that Griffey is in are Galaxy and Luminaries,” Bisio says. “They did four different parallels: a bronze, a silver, a gold, and a gold rainbow. The gold rainbows are numbered to 5.” Bisio he has gold rainbows for both the Galaxy and Luminaries runs. “The Luminaries one that I have is the only one I’ve ever seen,” he explains. “I’ve seen three of the five Galaxy gold rainbows.”