[SMPEP]

No offense to Dave and Bob ... but those numbers don't pass the smell test.

IF there were 151,500,000 total cards sold .... that would mean on AVERAGE (ignore DP and SP, which is the wrong way to think about it anyway, for a minute) that 372,236 copies were printed for every single card in the set. And actually, it has to be more than this, because there are uncut sheets that were not sold ... and cards which were given away out of the back of the trucks ... and most famously cards dumped in the harbor.

Now let's look at population reports of graded cards. We know that PSA has graded 1,194 Mickey Mantle cards, and SGC has graded another 346. There are probably a few more of these in random holders, or still raw ... but there aren't going to be that many ... so it's pretty generous to say that roughly 2,000 Mickey Mantles have been graded (by all the services). And then let's remember that Mantle was a DP for his series ... meaning that if he was a single print he would have about 1,000 cards. And that's still high when we look at 563 for Mathews, 432 for Dickey, 455 for Reese, 522 for Campy, etc.

Now we know that large quantities of the high numbers were never distributed ... but we know that there should have been roughly 100,000 (1,000*100 players(counting Mantle, Jacke and bobby twice)) of the final series cards distributed. This number may be low given that many cards got thrown away ... so for giggles ... let's double this already generous number and say 200,000 high numbers were distributed.

That means that instead of an average of 372,236 per card, we're now looking at 488,065 per non high number card ((151,500,000 -200,000)/310. [And even we tripled my estimate for high numbers distributed, you're still talking about 475,000+ cards per player.]

Out of this half million copies per card, we have 1,448 graded Willie Mats cards at PSA and another 309 at SGC. Now there are a lot of ungraded Mays' cards out there ... but if we multiply this by 4 (to be generous) you're saying that there are 8,000 copies in existence today.

So you're trying to tell me ... that Willie Mays ... one of the most popular players of that era .... had 480,000 cards thrown away by parents ... and only 8,000 now remain? That means that only 1.6% of the Mays that were originally printed survived.

Sorry.

Those numbers just don't pass the smell test to me. (And lest you want to say ... well, maybe not 1.6% survived ... but I could see 5% ... that would mean that 160,000 Mays cards were originally printed ... not the 488,065 claimed above. And if you start going up from 5% ... this looks even more ridiculous).

Cheers,
Patrick