R305 Tattoo Orbit and a population meditation

[timn1]

I've always found this set intriguing and started it in earnest last summer.

One thing I find puzzling is this comment from the SCD big book:

"Cards of Bump Hadley and George Blaeholder are the most elusive, followed by those of Ivy Andrews and Rogers Hornsby."

However, I have found Andrews cards to be extremely plentiful, and the other three named here also easy to find.

It only takes a glance at the PSA/SGC pop reports to verify this impression.
Here are the MOST frequently slabbed cards in the set as of today's Pop Reps:

NAME/PSA/SGC/TOTAL
Hadley 33 23 56
Tinning 30 26 56
Seeds 36 21 57
Jurges 40 18 58
Mack 33 26 59
Blaeholder 39 21 60
Hafey 35 28 63
Lyons 36 28 64
Simmons 36 28 64
Hartnett 39 27 66
Hornsby 38 29 67
Dean 46 25 71
Andrews 45 30 75
Foxx 51 28 79
Grove 48 35 83

I've been playing around a lot with Pop Reports lately and the distribution of HOFers at the plentiful end of the list is totally typical of most sets, since collectors and sellers are much more likely to have HOFers graded.

But if you remove the HOFers, Blaeholder and Andrews are the MOST frequently graded commons in the whole set, with Hadley just behind, and that's a little weird.

Even if you grant that because those three have the rep of scarcity, people may have tended to grade them somewhat more often, I think it's obvious that they are not at all scarce - at most quite common, at least average.

More broadly I don't see any significant rarities in the set. Obviously there are commons that are graded less often (the lowest are Levey 35, Collins 39, English and Porter 40), but those numbers don't seem low enough to be beyond the realm of chance.

Makes you think that in certain sets some of the presumed rarities must be akin to urban legends. I imagine they got started a long time when Burdick or Barker or one of the other pioneers had random difficulty finding a certain card, and concluded that that card was a scarcity, when it's clear with a larger sample that the reverse is true.

Thoughts? Other instances of these "false rarities"? I would welcome actual discussion of cards