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Posted By: Kevin Cummings

In a very basic sense, Old Judge cards are like any other commodity - the price will be determined by what the market will bear. If sellers slab Old Judge cards and automatically charge higher prices for them just because they are slabbed (don't they do that with every slabbed card?) and buyers continue to buy them, the prices will continue to go up. If we stopped buying them, the prices would stabilize or come down.

The problem with Old Judge cards that is not a problem with 2002 Toyota Corollas, for instance, is that most of us really don't know how rare the cards are in general and specifically at the player level. I think many collectors can gain some knowledge about which cards are more commonly seen than others (I'm certain that California Brown was not, for example, a short print) and make educated guesses. Some advanced collectors might have some more specific data and, therefore, a deeper understanding, but none of us really know exactly how many Gus Weyhings there are.

If we all knew with a high degree of certainty the exact world population of any Old Judge player (forgetting variations for this argument) prices could be accurately set and we might be more willing to wait out a purchase of a player we needed if we knew another was likely to come along.

Since that will never happen, I believe the intrinsic rarity of any 19th century item combined with the uncertainty of another item for which we are specifically searching ever showing up, leads us to buy at prices we might not otherwise pay - slab or not.

Now if someone was to put together an Old Judge population report.......