I've definitely noticed a significant increase in interest/price in Oh cards. Whether or not interest and prices are at the level one would expect is another matter. Personally, I think that often they are still a bargain relative to other players I find similarly interesting.
The main thing I think keeping prices lower (other than the relative obscurity of vintage Japanese baseball players in the US market) is the complicated nature of his rookie cards. I collect his rookie cards and still don't know exactly how many different RCs are out there. 60? 80? 100?
Many of these cards are extremely rare by an US standard (some are only known copies, a surprising number have only 5 or 10 or 25 known copies) but having so many of them muddies the water in terms of focus and demand. In my experience, real price escalation starts once things can be commodified and plugged into a hierarchy (like what happened once collecting focus shifted to graded cards and even registries). The card at the top of that hierarchy benefits the most (52T Mantle for example). It seems unlikely that will happen any time soon with Japanese cards. In fact, I'm surprised at the generally weak correlation between scarcity and price even today and take advantage of it to focus on rare issues myself. And it seem only recently have rookie cards started to command the premium one would normally expect (except maybe in Oh's case).
Anyway, without some agreed upon premier or iconic rookie card, I don't think we will ever see explosive growth. The 1959 Hoshi Gangu card seemed to occupy that place for a while. A number of higher grade cards were available in America, a bunch were graded, it's a distinctive card...it even has three versions of increasing scarcity (white, gold, and red bordered). Still, there so many other RCs and (to my mind) many more attractive ones.
Oh started playing in 1959, so that's the year of his rookie cards. But if somehow, magically, a late 1958 issue showed up of him in Giants uniform (even if before the season began), I think its price would clearly go through the roof in terms of price. This will never happen, but I think it demonstrated how the current situation with his rookie cards holds back the value.
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Originally Posted by ASF123
I actually disagree based on my own experience - I’ve been looking for an early Oh Menko card (‘59-‘61) on eBay for almost a year and haven’t found one in decent shape at a reasonable price. I think demand has gone up a lot recently.
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I think this is particularly true of graded cards. There aren't that many graded. US collectors appreciate graded cards. Grading prices and options to get new ones graded are currently very limited. And in just another case of moving goalposts, some TPGs are now grading them oddly when they do (I'm looking at you SGC).