Todd McFarlane’s Worthless Balls: Collection Shown in ‘Long Gone Summer’ Has Lost Millions in Value

Comic book fans have known for years that Todd McFarlane is not the sharpest skate in the… ice skate… holder… thing. The dude drew some iconic Spider-Man covers and created Spawn, an inexplicably popular character from the post-Watchmen era of “extreme” comics, but have you ever listened to him talk?

Seriously, what is going on there? Why is he just sitting in a warehouse drawing Spawn? What is going on?

If you watched ESPN’s latest 30 For 30 doc Long Gone Summer, which you probably didn’t, you saw Todd McFarlane’s balls. As anyone who read Wizard Magazine in the late 90s and early 2000s already knew, Todd blew millions of dollars on baseballs. In particular, he spent over $3 million on Mark McGuire’s record-setting 70th home run ball from the 1998 season, a record that was almost immediately broken by Barry Bonds.

TMZ looked into how Todd’s balls have faired over the years and they don’t look good, folks. That ball Todd played $3 million for in 1998? He’d be lucky to get $400k for it now, and it’d probably be closer to $250k. And Todd bought a lot of baseballs, not just the one. Imagine telling your accountant when you’re doing your taxes that you need to write down millions of dollars of losses in baseballs.

This is the same day that TMZ reported a LeBron James basketball card is expected to sell for a million dollars. That’s like, four times what Todd’s balls are worth. Plus the card will make a much cooler sound in the spokes of your bike.