Quote:
Originally Posted by JollyElm
Too bad we don't have a searchable database here to list cards like this one, cards that are statistical anomalies and much 'rarer' (or having low pops?) than they should ever be, perhaps due to centering and/or other factors. It'd be great digging through your stuff and running across a beautiful common that you never gave a second look to, but now realize you could have something pretty great!!
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So that was an interesting enough thought for me that I bothered to check this one out in detail: ~27k PSA 9s graded for the set, and ~610 items means an avg of 44 PSA 9s per item. I hypothesized maybe all the team cards had lower than avg 9 representation, perhaps out of low interest among collectors compared to player cards... turns out that's not the case:
The team cards avg 46 9s apiece, so spot on with the rest of the set (not a meaningful statistical difference) except one, you guessed it, that Pirates card is only a pop 15 for some reason, so only a third the avg quantity available (the next lowest has 27, and all the rest are 30 and well over). Also interesting is that there is only 1 GEM Pirates card whereas the team cards as a whole avg 3.33, so again the Pirate card has only a third the quantity available on the market. [To be clear, a number of other team cards only have 1 GEM also (they are difficult to achieve after all), but a bunch of them do have 6-7 GEMs, which does seem a meaningful difference.]
That said, although it is romantic to think there are many undiscovered mint cards in collector hoards out there, somehow I doubt things much work out that way. It is a mystery to me how cards survive that long maintaining that level of condition, but when it happens I wonder if for the most part those items are expressly not coming from the collections of real collectors (that use and handle their cards over the years), but rather from disinterested persons that hadn't touched them and luckily had the forethought to hire a professional to help them sort through once they were rediscovered during a move or upon death.