Quote:
Originally Posted by puckpaul
You are really asking why Ryan is so popular? Seriously?
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292 losses, .526 PCT. Led the league in walks 8 times, ERA 2 times, Wins 0 times.
The guy had the arm to be the GOAT but not the makeup. (He had plenty of makeup all right: the makeup to try to strike out every batter and to throw a no-hitter every time out - but not to WIN any way he could.)
IOW, the poster's question is a great one. Ryan was a phenomenon, absolutely, but not head-and-shoulders above all the other greats of the era - yet his card prices are way out of scale with almost all of them.
I suspect this has a lot to do with the specific dynamics of the hobby from about 1989-1994, which is when Ryan's cards really took off.
For market and also psychological reasons I think the hobby has needed a single supersuperstar from every era to drive values. Wagner, Cobb, Ruth, Mantle have been in this position for decades now, and this doesn't look to change.
With more recent eras, it's somewhat more fluid. During most of the 1980s the guy was Pete Rose, whose ugly little decapitated rookie image from 1963 Topps was going for wild money for years, way above any other post-1960 rookie. But although the hobby was still in a serious growth mode, after the 1989 Rose/Giamatti debacle someone else was needed in this role.
So Ryan was the right guy at the right time, Amazingly, he hadn't lost much if anything off his performance, and it looked like he was going to pitch forever (as Rose had looked ten years earlier, though he was no longer the player he had been). He was adopted by a large segment of the casual collecting hobby.
In the last three decades, Ryan's star has dimmed a bit, but because his cards were so pricey from so long time ago, people have a lot of money tied up in them, and don't want to let them go cheap. Hence the prices stay up there compared to his contemporaries who were not still playing when the hobby price boom came, especially Bench, who retired in '83.)
Actually, the same thing goes on with Rose, whose cards never completely collapsed in value despite the disgrace. His rookie is still far higher relative to almost everyone's in the era. ($2K for a PSA 5, while Billy Williams' 1961 Topps rookie in PSA 5 is like $75!). I think this is almost entirely a residual effect of Rose cards being so high from such a long time ago.