Diamonds

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Posted By: identify7

A diamond is a rare and precious commodity, particularly if it is near perfect and sized one carat and above. Particularly in downtown Bumfk. However, in Manhattan in the upper 40s on the west side, they are less rare. And to Andrew Coxon, President of the De Beers Institute of Diamonds these items are not quite so rare. But rarity is a quantifiable term. And the truth is that diamonds are plentiful, except for special cases.

The same is true for baseball cards. They are plentiful, except for special cases. Sellers often employ relative terminology to characterize some of these special cases in their descriptions of cards. Terms including “rare”, “very rare”, ‘scarce” and other descriptors are employed to communicate the relative abundance of some issues. But this terminology is inexact. And perhaps our awareness is insufficient to be more definitive.

Some collectors have a focus on the rarity of the choices which they select for inclusion into their library of cards. Although, that criteria is not a primary focus of mine, I have elected to avoid bidding on cards which appear too frequently (this could be due to popularity, as well as commonness). And I wish that we had a tool to establish the absolute number of individual cards which are known to exist in every set.

A portion of our sister hobby, coin collecting, has gone to extreme effort to establish this information for many coin varieties. They have actually traveled (when appropriate) to each coin in order to photograph it for documentation of its existence and condition (of course, this applies only to the rarest or highest condition coins). And as a part of a typical coin’s sale description is a numerical designation of that unit’s relative rarity. For example:

R1 = common
R2 = 501-1250 known
R3 = 201-500 known
R4 = 116-160 known
R5 = 46-60 known
R6 = 19-24 known
R7 = 7-9 known
R8 = 2 known

I suppose that although this detail may be desirable to some baseball card collectors, it is easy to wish for something, but entirely different to actually make it so. But I betcha that there are some persons knowledgeable enuff to take a stab at a proposed set of rarity definitions for many sets and individual cards.

If this is so, then the outstanding effort could simply become one in which each supposition would need to be disproved. A far simpler task, and one with far less urgency.

Anybody have a guess regarding how many t206 Wagners exist? Anyone care to tabulate the guesses?

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Posted By: Brad Green

Gil:

Glad to see you posting again! I always enjoy reading what you have to say! I hope all is well!

Brad

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Posted By: peter ullman

that grading system is similar to the one hager tried to employ in his bloated price book years ago...presumably since he's a coin man. I'd venture there are 63 wagners out there.

pete ullman

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

I'd guesstimate the T206 Wagner to be an R4.

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Posted By: Steve M.

R4.8

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Posted By: barrysloate

Hi Gil- welcome back.

We had a previous post about this very subject, that "rare" is thrown around carelessly and should be used with more precision. We could set up a system such as the one used in numismatics, but I'm not really sure any of us know how many of each card has survived. What would an N172 Anson be? How about a T206 green Cobb? We just don't know the survival rate.

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Posted By: Jason L

even before trying to learn how many of a certain card has survived through to today, do we have information about how many of each set was produced in the first place? (For example, how many T200s were produced?)

Again, please direct me if this is already well known/published...I would be interested to know. Because this seems to be the first question...

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Posted By: barrysloate

No, and that's a good point. The Mint documents how many coins are made each year, but no such information exists regarding baseball cards. I think it has been estimated around one million T206 have survived, but nobody knows for sure, and certainly nobody knows how many were printed.

An interesting question that could be mathematically estimated is: what is the attrition rate for vintage cards? For example, what percentage of Old Judges or T206's have survived? Is it 2%, 5%, 10%? I really don't know.

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Posted By: Jason L

there are probably a series of questions that could be strung together in an effort to estimate production numbers for various vintage card sets...

And I would think that if no company documents exist, you may be able to ballpark production based on estimated company sales figures for the products that the cards were packaged with...? and other variables such as distribution geographies, population, etc...but of course, this will be an extreme academic exercise that wouldn't yield as satisfying a result as simply trying to estimate how many of each card still exist, or at least still circulate (an even smaller subset)...

idle thoughts for a Friday lunch at my desk!

A not-terribly-related question: How many of you have ever thrown away cards? I'll go first. I got so disgusted with the way the hobby was going in 1988 with the proliferation of sets and over-printing, etc, I looked at my dozens of boxes of commons and uncompleted sets (1985-1988 topps), I took out the HOFers, and then dumped thousands of cards in the trash, figuring the storage space carried a larger premium than what I was filling it with!!! This was the light bulb going off in my head about scarcity and relative value. And the fact that no one else wanted them helped trigger the epiphany...because that is the definition of garbage: stuff that no one else wants