Memory Lane on the brain

[Vintageclout]

Originally Posted by raulus

Some hot takes based on a few hours of digging around:

(Disclosure: I didn't bid on anything, nor did I win anything, so for the first time in a while, I'm not personally invested here). Also, all of my notes about prices below include the juice, so I won't bother to specify that every time.

I'm a Mays guy, so I'll focus on him and ignore everyone else. It's helpful that he's generally well represented in most auctions, which generally means that there's a decent population to consider, including decent historical activity to compare against. I'm also focused on PSA graded pieces, since they are the most plentiful, and on his mainline cards, which seems to be where the action is.

At present, it seems like his secondary cards (for example, the 1959 Topps ##317, 464, and 563) are all about double what they were pre-pandemic, give or take. Many of those cards still sell relatively affordably even in high grades like PSA 8 or 9, coming in at $1k or less. So a bit of action there, but nowhere really close to the results on the mainline cards.

I also think that the 53T PSA 8 in this auction is probably a bit of a special story. To my knowledge, one hasn't come onto the market since 2019, so between the 3-year gap and the pandemic driving everyone nuts and everyone having too much cash burning a hole in their pockets, it was going to go for a lot. Pre-pandemic, they routinely sold for right around $30k, give or take. This one at $194k was certainly strong, coming in at about 6.5x the pre-pandemic average price. It will definitely be interesting to see where they land if a few more come onto the market over the next year or so and some of the pent-up demand gets satisfied a bit more.

I decided to look at everything that was included in this auction and try to figure out if I could learn a few things based on looking at the whole, rather than just concentrating on any one item. I looked at basically all of his mainline pieces and compared the closing prices here to the pandemic highs, and then comparing to the average selling price pre-pandemic, just to get a better sense as to where the market is relative to those data points.

Sorting through the data, some interesting trends emerged (again, ignoring the 53T PSA 8):

1) The ratio of pandemic high to the pre-pandemic average was pretty consistently about 4.5 or 5x. I think most of us would guess at this ratio in general, just based on what we're generally seeing in the market.

2) The ratio of prices in this auction to the pre-pandemic average varied a bit more. For a lot of issues, the ratio was about 2.5x to 3.5x. The big outlier was the 66T PSA 9, which landed at about 9x.

3) Only 2 cards reached all-time highs - 66T PSA 9 and 62T PSA 8. At the same time, the fact that they reached all-time highs that are even higher than 2021 highs suggests that there's still plenty of demand.

4) Comparing the prices from this auction to the pandemic highs (other than the 2 cards that reached all-time highs), the current prices are about 65% to 75% of the pandemic highs. At the same time, I was surprised in some cases to see the pandemic highs were relatively recent - sometimes just in the last few months or even just last month (and in some cases as noted above, this auction was the high).

5) I was also somewhat surprised on one point - I expected that the 51-53 issues would show stronger results in terms of spiking higher all around. While they are slightly on the higher end of the ranges, they were still "only" at 3.5x to 4.5x when comparing this auction to pre-pandemic prices, and about 4.5x to 5.5x when comparing pandemic highs to pre-pandemic prices.

It does seem like overall, 51-53 remain very loved, and the highest possible grade for any given year (even in later years) ends up getting lots of love.

We'll see what happens in large auctions going forward, and maybe I'll take the time to do a similar analysis, but if this is any indication, the party definitely isn't over, although for the most part, we're coming off of those pandemic highs a bit.

One Willie Mays sale from last night that you failed to mention was his PSA 3.5 signed 1952 Topps subject that sold for an extraordinary $93K! That figure more than doubled the previous $39.9K record realized in Heritage earlier this year. Deviating from Mays for a moment, can’t help mentioning the $75K record sale of a PSA 4 VG-EX 1927 E126 Babe Ruth - beyond amazing & further substantiating the meteoric-like pricing increase of pre-1930 Ruth cards. They simply go higher & higher……