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Definitely lots of private transactions in this segment of the hobby and no way to track those, of course.

But for those public auction items, as previously mentioned, prices spiked during the selling of the key items of the Merkin collection by Hake's a few years back. However, very strong prices on Negro League items were also realized at the same time by REA, Huggins & Scott, Heritage and others so we can't just attribute everything to the Merkin collection.

It is my opinion that collecting Negro League material suddenly became the "en vogue" thing when all of the Merkin stuff plus others hit the market over a relatively short period of time. When things started to dry up, those collectors maybe got out of the market and moved on to other things.

Do you think I am on the right track towards explaining things here? Could it be simply one or two individuals that made all the difference in market fluctuations?