Will Stephen Strasburg’s injury make some baseball card collectors suicidal?

If you’re a Washington Nationals fan, you’re absolutely sick over the news that rookie pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg will need to have Tommy John surgery.  He’s gone for the rest of the season and will probably be shut down for all of 2011 as well.

But you know who’s even sicker about this?  The people who’ve paid a lot of money for some of the Strasburg memorabilia that’s already hit the market.  I wrote about this back in May, before he’d even been promoted to the big leagues.

After that, the feeding frenzy for all things Strasburg only got more intense.  It seemed to peak earlier this summer when an accountant from Michigan named Robert Power purchased the Bowman Chrome “Superfractor” card of Strasburg for $16,403.  Only one of these cards (a “true 1/1″ in hobby terms) was manufactured by Topps.

However, the ceiling for this particular card hadn’t been met.  Here is Power himself being interviewed about his subsequent resale of the card (what a nerd herd these guys are):

So Brian Gray of Razor Entertainment purchased the card for $25,000 in order to offer it up as part of his company’s “Rookie Retro” offering:

In light of recent events, I’m pretty sure even the most rabid Strasburg fan isn’t going to pony up the cash to try to pursue the Superfractor through this Rookie Retro offering.  Basically, Gray bought a grenade that already had its pin removed.

And how lucky of a bastard is this Robert Power dude?  If he had sat on the card waiting for an even bigger offer than Gray’s, he’d be curled up in the fetal position right about now.  Instead, he dodged a bullet and pulled a nice profit in the process.

After news of the injury broke, I did a quick check on eBay and found one poor shlub who’s currently on the hook to pay at least $255 for a Strasburg card: