Survival Rate of N172 Old Judge

[sandmountainslim]

In my studies of the T206 (to satisfy my OCD) I learned that many experts believe there are about a million T206 cards in circulation and about 3000 examples of the average common card.
My recent fascination over OJ has gotten me to wondering if anyone had made similar educated estimations about the survival rate of this set?
I am guessing there is likely less than a million total for the surviving cards and probably a great deal less than 3000 of the surviving commons. I base this on pricing :)
Does anyone have any more accurate numbers?
Thanks.

[BicycleSpokes]

I read your earlier thread today with interest, and found myself wondering this exact thing! Hope somebody can shed light on this...

[z28jd]

There is no player(including all his poses/variations) that comes anywhere close to 3000 examples, or even half that much. Some players have less than ten examples. I'd be very surprised if there were 100,000 Old Judge cards in existence.

[Fred]

John,

Can you please provide an estimate of how many Larry Corcoran cards are in existence? The total shame is that 80% of all known copies would be destroyed if a 2 square foot area were to be ignited..... :p

I've wondered the same thing myself. How many of these cards are still around.

[darwinbulldog]

I would guess there are at least 2 million T206s.

100,000 is probably a good estimate for OJs.

[sandmountainslim]

I would guess there are at least 2 million T206s.

100,000 is probably a good estimate for OJs.

You could be right. When I got into T206 I figured they were like hen's teeth due to the age then I noticed I was having zero problem finding cards in my price range and realized they must have been produced in the multi millions :)

[oldjudge]

100,000 is way too much. There are roughly 2500 different poses, which would mean 40 copies each on average. This number might be right for the more common poses, but way high for most (some are unique or have less than five copies). My guess would be 30,000-40,000.

[ctownboy]

The question has to be asked then, how many do members of this board own?

Wouldn't that give a good estimate of what else might be out there?

Also, who owns (or maybe the top three to five collectors) the most N172's? Keith Olbermann?

I own none cards total (one pose, nine different players).

David

[Leon]

100,000 is way too much. There are roughly 2500 different poses, which would mean 40 copies each on average. This number might be right for the more common poses, but way high for most (some are unique or have less than five copies). My guess would be 30,000-40,000.

Jay, I will never deny your expertise in N172. That being said, if I think of you and just 3-4 other guys, I probably get close to a third of the low number you said. My gut, from being in the hobby a few years, would lead me to believe the number is somewhere in the middle of your high estimate and 100,000. I am always the optimist in thinking there is a ton we have no idea about. And almost every month we hear about new finds of pre-war cards (if not Old Judges).....

[Tao_Moko]

We could estimate a population based on what's in circulation and documented through AH's, ebay, forums, shows, etc.. I think the real thing to look at is roughly how many surface annually and combine the estimated circulated qty and avg. documented new finds to determine what is a likey survival rate. The big unknown is how many were produced which will make projecting new finds difficult. The late eighties and early nineties sent everyone to their grandma's attic and a lot were exposed then. Ebay later brought more out of personal collections so I think we're going to see a steady but slow introduction of new finds.

My arbitrary guess is 60,000.

[Fred]

my guess is 54,326....:o

[barrysloate]

My guess is 40-50K. While there are certainly some OJ's still hidden away in somebody's attic, I wouldn't imagine that number would be huge. Sure, a few hundred here and there, but that's about it.

[sandmountainslim]

I wonder if OJ caused a card frenzy when they were released the way I have read that T206 did? Kids pestering smokers for the cards etc?
For some reason I think "Old West" when I see Old Judge cards and can't see many people holding on to them. Of course Im sure most of the cigs were sold back east instead of the western territories.

[Joe_G.]

One of my favorite topics.

Old Judge cards were immensely popular with the boys of the 1880s. I'd like to refer to an excerpt from Dave Jamieson's "Mint Condition". This is a "must read" for those curious about Old Judge popularity at time of production. Dave Jamieson did some fantastic research here which alone is worth the purchase of his book.

http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/old-judge-launched-large-scale-baseball-card-distribution/

Goodwin's peak production of baseball cards would be realized in 1889. Records show that in that year they produced 168 million cigarettes. Ten count packs were common (higher counts less so) with perhaps ~20% (total swag on my part) of total production sold in US, packaged with an N172 baseball card (remainder containing N171, N174, N164, N165, possibly N162, and others). These numbers would suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million N172s (pending take rates of 10 vs 20 count packs etc.).

Survival rate has not been very good. There are tough cards from every year of production, the cards were not produced in equal numbers. I believe there are many poses and even players (California League players for example) that have been lost to time. Population reports for the players that have survived range from unique to maybe 300-500 (on the high end, SGC has a population of better than 100 grade entries for Tim Keefe - split between 9 poses). I agree with Jay and several others on current population. I've looked at it from a couple different angles and I just don't see there being 100,000 cards surviving. While the most common players/poses could hit that average required to arrive at 100,000, most of the players/poses are far rarer.

There are a small number of significant collections. Several private and publicly held collections exceed 400 players with even less making a significant run at all the poses. I believe the top five collections in the world fall short of 10,000 OJs collectively. The next 20 holdings likely also fall under 10,000 OJs collectively. After that you are getting to the smaller team and other subset collectors or just a small random sampling with, on average, fewer than 100 cards. If I add all the numbers up and double them you could hit 50k cards but I believe that is a stretch. I like the range of 30-50k cards existent.

[z28jd]

Good stuff and well thought out Joe. Obviously put a lot of time into it. I'm just trying to figure out how many cards exist of one player with two poses, forget all the players and poses! :)

[darwinbulldog]

For what it's worth, there are currently 20 times as many T206s as N172s on eBay. I wasn't aware of what that ratio would be until I checked just now, but that's consistent with what you'd predict from total population figures of 2 million and 100,000. There are other factors at play, but it seems unlikely (to me anyway) that N172s are systematically less likely to be hoarded/more likely to be flipped than T206s, so that particular bit of circumstantial evidence suggests there are at least 5% as many OJs as T206s. Thoughts?

[oldjudge]

Glenn--Old Judges, regardless of condition, rarely sell for less than $100. Low grade, non-HOF T206s with common backs are very low value and generally not worth listing on Ebay. The ratio you come up with doesn't mean much, at least not to me. If I go through the counts for the 25 largest collections of Old Judges worldwide, including dups, I am still quite a bit under 20,000. Virtually all other collections are between a few and fifty cards, with most closer to the former. Even if I assume 5,000 cards with dealers (I believe this is high) I still struggle to get past 30,000 cards.

[h2oya311]

Joe and oldjudge - thanks for adding your expertise.

For those who were unfamiliar with Joe's use of the word "swag", it's a term that many in the investments/finance/actuarial world use when referring to a Scientific Wild Ass Guess

Lots of SWAG going on in this thread...but all result in <50k

[darwinbulldog]

That makes sense. I suppose I was just trying to be provocative. I could also have pointed out that if you look at eBay sales instead of eBay listings, there are 67 (not 20) times as many T206s.

That's a pretty big range of course, but presumably the actual ratio falls between 20 and 67 T206s for every OJ. If we assume 2 million of the former, that gives us anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 of the latter -- which puts us right back in the range we were debating inside of anyway.

I'll defer to your expertise and concede at least that it's probably below the mid-point of that range.

edited to add: This is in response to Jay.

[z28jd]

Another way you can think about it is the amount of poses out there. There are around 2460 poses. Jay knows the exact number. If the average pose had 12 examples, that would give you the 30,000. There are plenty where 1-2 are known for a pose and even more that are well over 12 known examples and I assume just as many where 12 is a good guess as to what is left.

I'm not sure if 12 is a safe middle ground. If you ask some pose collectors, even easy to find players have poses that are nearly impossible to find.

[packs]

If 2,000,000 people bought a pack of Old Judges throughout the period of 1887-1889 (assuming they got a baseball card) and just 3% survived that equates to 60,000 cards.

Edited to add the US population was estimated to be 59,000,000 in 1887. Under my scenario a little over 3% of the population got at least 1 baseball OJ throughout the period.

[barrysloate]

To get a sense of how popular OJ's were in their day, consider that major league baseball was hugely popular in the 1880's, and that the majority of fans never had the opportunity to ever attend a game. As such, most fans probably had no idea what their favorite players looked like save for a woodcut in a newspaper.

Now consider with the release of the OJ's, fans everywhere now had access to a real photograph of pretty much any player they chose. It's hard to imagine that OJ's weren't immensely popular, if not the rage of the day. For avid baseball fans they were a miracle.

[uffda51]

Interesting stuff. My guess would be close to what Jay and Joe have said.

I'm up to 200 OJs at the moment. I doubt I will get to 300.

http://imageevent.com/uffda51/18871890n172oldjudge;jsessionid=ty6ys0xgt2.penguin _s

[sandmountainslim]

Right now I am wondering if my first OJ card has survived the USPS :( The seller shipped it two day priority mail with tracking and insurance on monday and according to the track and confirm site it has been "in transit" from it's last check in until now.....was scheduled to arrive here yesterday and there have been no updates in two days. My mind is filled with images of it sliding around in the floorboard of some idiot's mail truck while he wiped his feet on it :(

[Fred]

Not much could have happened to it... it's USPS and it's tracked and insured...


http://dontthrowmypackage.com/

[Joe_G.]

Just a couple comments and follow-up as I've received a couple emails about this thread. To answer the original question, I believe the survival rate is less than 1%. We seem to agree that there are no more than 50k N172s with us today and I believe there may have been more than 5 million originally produced from 1886-1890 (yes, this is a SWAG but based on some known information from 1889).

Some of the largest collections are not private collections, but instead housed in museums. The Burdick collection, for example, is extremely close to 2000 N172s. We then have Sir Edward Wharton-Tigar and others that fall in the #6-#25 such as LOC (476), BB HOF (400), etc. This is based on strictly N172s; the BB HOF has a very impressive N173 collection (250 cabinets) to boot.

To summarize, I believe the top five collections account for less than 10k cards and the next 20 fall even further from 10k. If we really did a deep dive, I suspect the top 25 collections are closer to 15k than 20k. I do realize there are a good number of small collections out there with active collectors and dealers but of the 3 groups (1-5 largest, 6-25 largest, and the rest), the smallest collections enjoy the highest collector/dealer head count but account for the smallest total population. So we might be able to arrive at 20-25k cards in known private and public collections but doubling this to cover the unknown cards seems excessive. I think the safe range remains at 30-50k.

For those who haven't read Dave Jamieson's reasearch on Old Judge card popularity when they were produced and distributed . . . Read It Here! (http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/old-judge-launched-large-scale-baseball-card-distribution/)

Many adults and kids smoked heavily to build sizeable collections. Consider all the albums and cabinets that were ordered. At least 200-350 cigarettes (20-35 N172s accumulated) for every cabinet (depending on when it was ordered) or at least 750 cigarettes (75 N172s accumulated) in order to collect enough coupons for a Round Album (assumes all 10 count packs). Old Judge cigarettes were consumed at a scary rate by some individuals and families to be able to redeem their favorite player or team cabinets and albums.

[1880nonsports]

the thirst young boys showed for the acquistion of these cardboard treasures was even reflected on a couple of Duke cards in the stamps series circa 1888. I have a few thoughts about population numbers - no time for that just this second. I will however suggest that the whole equation may be severely impacted by the population of MY collection........one OJ.

edited to clarify ONE N172........

[1880nonsports]

as opposed to the boys - may have had their minds elsewhere. From a great Duke 1880's advertising piece.