Every championship team these days seems to have a tie to Drake. He’s either the team’s most vocal celebrity fan or a combative supporter of their opponents. The Los Angeles Dodgers were the latest member of the latter group. Drake took shots at Shohei Ohtani during the 2025 World Series, where the Dodgers faced the rapper’s hometown Toronto Blue Jays. But Ohtani’s teammate, Kiké Hernandez, got the last word in during his championship celebration speech. Hernández used that moment to talk about his “really big team that has a lot of big rings.”
It was a reference to the song “Big Rings” by Drake and Future, and it was a moment that inspired the creation of a unique collectible: An album cover (complete with vinyl record inside) depicting Hernandez in the style of Drake’s “Nothing Was The Same” album art, with “Los Angeles Owns October” printed in the form of a parental advisory sticker on it. The creative collectible sells for $50, with copies signed by Hernandez priced at $200 and inscribed with “October’s very own” for $300.
The Hernandez album cover is part of a series produced by innovative collectibles company The Realest, and includes others featuring players such as Ohtani and Aaron Judge. The concept comes from The Realest’s founder, Scott Keeney, better known as DJ Skee. But the series is just one offering from a company now attracting major investment from some of sports’ biggest players’ associations.
The Realest recently closed $12 million in Series A funding to expand its authentication technology and relationships across sports, music and film. This round of funding is led by EnOne Ventures, a partnership fund between leading alternative asset management firm EnTrust Global and OneTeam Partners, which is a collaboration between the MLB Players Association, NFL PA, WNBPA, USWNT PA and MLS PA. This round also includes investments from Elysian Park Ventures, the PGA of America and Interlock Capital, with additional funding from seed investors KB Partners, Alumni Ventures and BAM Ventures.
“The Realest is a culturally resonant platform and exactly the kind of authentic, athlete- and creator-led IP we believe in,” said OneTeam Partners CEO Sean Sansiveri.
Evan Kaplan, president of MLB Players Inc., collaborated with The Realest on the album series after witnessing the culture during Major League Baseball’s opening series in Tokyo last season.
“The way fans there treat baseball like a cultural event instead of just a game. The circus left and people wanted more, so what could we do?” Kaplan said.
The albums aren’t playable — they’re art pieces in vinyl form. They’re officially licensed through the MLB PA, giving The Realest full rights to use names, likenesses and all the personality-driven elements that make the designs pop.
“Japan has this wild passion for collectibles, especially physical art pieces with personality behind them. We wanted to build something that captured that same spark,” Keeney said.
The Realest wanted to create something for a younger, more diverse crowd than baseball is traditionally associated with.
“That’s where the vinyl idea came in. I’ve been toying with a collectible vinyl concept ever since my card series with Topps, where I mashed up album covers with athletes,” Keeney said. The next logical step to Keeney was, “What if we treated players like music artists and built an actual rollout around them?”
Baseball cards for music fans is what Keeney calls it. “Vinyl has this massive comeback right now, and half the people buying records don’t even own a record player. They buy vinyl for the same reason collectors chase parallels or rare inserts. It’s art. Its identity. It’s displayable. It’s a flex. So instead of making more trading cards, we flipped the format and turned them into albums.”
Collectors care about scarcity. Keeney emphasizes the similarities to cards by highlighting that this first pressing is their first (print) run. “First pressings are the holy grail in vinyl culture. So our first run is exactly that: the first pressing,” he said.
The Japan-only Ohtani pressing was numbered out of 100. Everything else in that run was unnumbered, but still part of the limited first offering. Future drops will add parallel-style elements: alternate vinyl colors, special etching, limited variants, signature components, more experimental packaging. This first wave is the foundation of storytelling through vinyl.
The Shohei Ohtani x DJ Skee “Greatest Hits” collectible album. (The Realest)
Keeney, now 42 years old, left high school early, began selling mix tapes and got into the radio business. He’s credited with “discovering” the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, and has routinely sat in the intersection of music and sports. He was the first to DJ at an NFL game, a NASCAR race, an MLB Playoff game and an NBA game.
“My career has been about shaping how people discover what’s next in culture, with storytelling at the center,” Keeney said in a press release announcing the round of investment. “The Realest brings that into physical products, turning cultural moments into authenticated collectibles fans can own and engage with.”
“A lot of the things we sell are worthless to 99.9 percent of the people, but it’s the hardcore fans, it’s priceless to them because of what it represents and the authentication that says it is real,” he told The Athletic.
Another key component of The Realest’s operation is one that has become a major point of concern for collectors, as instances of fraud seem to be on the rise: authenticity.
“Our foundation is on-site authentication at the world’s biggest events, whether it’s the Super Bowl, the Ryder Cup, Coachella or a (Philadelphia) Eagles game,” DJ Skee said.
Tony Gwynn’s 1990 Gold Glove award, recently sold by the Gwynn family in partnership with The Realest. (The Realest)
The Realest tackles this with a two-layer system. Its gold sticker is the top tier, reserved for items they personally witnessed and tracked on-site in real time, such as Lamar’s Super Bowl outfit moments before he took the stage at the halftime show. (The Realest authenticated and collected that outfit but it has yet to be placed for auction.) The silver sticker widens the net for legitimate pieces not witnessed firsthand by The Realest, but verified through trusted sources such as estates and supported by experts and affidavits, including the company’s work with Tony Gwynn’s family. Gwynn’s 1990 Rawlings Gold Glove award was sold for $102,100 and his 1994 Silver Slugger award was sold for $60,500, both new records for those awards.
Making this the foundation of a company aptly named The Realest has enabled a wide variety of moments in sports to become fun and unique collectibles. For example, the snow in Philly.
“We were inspired by Rita’s Water Ice, and we wanted a design that reflected Philly in a community,” Keeney said.
Working with the Philadelphia Eagles is setting the tone for a new type of viewer and fan. Anything you see during a game can become a collectible through The Realest. The backlit Eagles logo LED sign hanging in the players’ tunnel on Nov. 28, 2025, at Lincoln Financial Field? It was authenticated by The Realest and auctioned off for $1,406 to a fan to bring into their den.
It is no longer just programs or a bobblehead that can be sports collectibles; it is every item tied to a game or athlete. Everyone walks into a game with an attraction to something different. It brings everything to an equal level for fans to grab a slice of their favorite game — even an end zone pylon.
The latest examples in the Eagles Holiday Collection included “E” ornaments cut from an authentic team-issued jersey from the 2023-24 NFL season ($30) and tote bags cut from the Super Bowl banner that hung outside the Linc ($160).
These are items that may have been stashed away in a storage room or even trashed after an event such as the Ryder Cup, where The Realest sold everything from course-used yardage signs to team-used celebratory champagne bottles ($99) and captain’s golf carts ($33,500).
The Professional Women’s Hockey League has also partnered with The Realest, creating a first-of-its-kind authentication program for the league. These entities see value in creating new revenue streams for charitable arms and creating conversation pieces for fans.
“Everything that’s there, you have more of an affinity if you’re looking at something, if it’s like confetti from the Super Bowl, we productize it into a clear (beer) can.”
The Athletic maintains full editorial independence in all our coverage. When you click or make purchases through our links, we may earn a commission.