2 Men Awarded $33 Million in Baseball-Card Suit : Courts: The award to the attorneys, based on a 3% stake in Upper Deck Co., means the jury believes that the company is worth more than $1 billion.

An Orange County jury determined Friday that two lawyers who sued Upper Deck Co., a fast-growing baseball-card maker, should receive a $33.1-million award for their 3% stake in the company.

Last week the jury found that Upper Deck executives gave a 3% share of the company to Anthony J. Passante Jr. when the company was started in Yorba Linda in 1988. Passante subsequently agreed to split the stake with Andrew J. Prendiville. Officials at the company, who denied that the attorneys owned the stake, did not return calls for comment.

On Friday, the jury said the 3% stake is worth $33.1 million, which means the company itself is valued at a whopping $1.1 billion. In addition, the jury ordered Boris Korbel, one of the company’s officers, to pay the two attorneys $1 million.

“We think (the award) is unbelievable and ridiculous,” said Camron Bussard, spokesman for the company. “We find it incomprehensible that Mr. Passante could perpetrate a fraud on the company and still receive the award. We think it is a sad state of affairs that the jury was so unintelligent and unsophisticated that it could not distinguish between reality and fiction.”

Bussard said Upper Deck will continue to litigate against “any attacks on the company.”

Passante served as Upper Deck’s first corporate secretary from about March, 1988, to December, 1988. Vincent Bartolotta, attorney for Passante, argued that Passante was there at a critical point in the company’s history and arranged for a $100,000 loan that saved the firm.

Upper Deck President Richard McWilliam, who testified during the trial, estimated that the market value of the company was about $250 million. But an expert witness for Passante estimated that the market value, as of Dec. 31, 1992, was $1.5 billion.

Privately held Upper Deck disclosed during the trial that its 1992 revenue was $263.2 million and dividends were $66.7 million. Upper Deck started in 1988 and has become a major challenger to Topps Co. in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the fiercely competitive $2-billion baseball-card industry. The company moved from Yorba Linda in 1991 to a $12-million plant in Carlsbad.