Thoughts on T206 Hoarding/Creating scarcities

[Cardboard Junkie]

I think I heard K. O. has/had 2? Not sure and Red Wimmer wrote an article about a guy in Detroit that had 2 Wagz. Article was in SCD in the late 80's/ early 90's? I may be misremembering.

[GasHouseGang]

I wouldn't think one person could drive up the prices by purchasing all of the cards he could find of one player. However, I remember an article being written about Reggie Jackson going to a bunch of baseball card shows and purchasing all of his 1969 Topps rookie cards he could find. I don't know if it was his goal, but at least temporarily the price went up on that particular card.

[hshrimps]

What about people who are "hoarding" all those miscuts, ghosts, etc to create a price peak on those "used to be junk" cards? That's the same thing IMO.

[barrysloate]

Pure guesstimate, but I would say closer to two million survived, with the more common ones represented by over five thousand examples each. It would be interesting to have other long time collectors post their estimates too. I bet if enough people responded, and we averaged their answers, we could be reasonably close to how many are out there. Unscientific, of course, but maybe more accurate than we might think.

Anyone else?

[Cardboard Junkie]

My guess is 10,000+ examples of any common . I believe that most are in collections, raw, and haven't "circulated" in the hobby in years if at all.

[z28jd]

Take it from someone who "hoards" a particular non-T206 card strictly as a collector and not for resale. The person who ends up paying the most is the hoarder. You would really need to do something on the down low for it to eventually pay off. Once people know you want something, they suddenly want it too and the price keeps going up. That's how I ended up spending 2-3x the value on the last 4-5 I bought. That's fine if the value goes from $20 to $50 as a T206 common, but for Old Judge cards, it means a lot more.

[thehoodedcoder]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

Pure guesstimate, but I would say closer to two million survived, with the more common ones represented by over five thousand examples each. It would be interesting to have other long time collectors post their estimates too. I bet if enough people responded, and we averaged their answers, we could be reasonably close to how many are out there. Unscientific, of course, but maybe more accurate than we might think.

Anyone else?

if that was the case, say 5k of each card, and you paid 20 bucks a pop for them, for 20k you could sop up 20 percent of the availability.

that is a huge number and its not out of reach. to think that won't affect price is absurd. if you came to the game with the intent to get them as fast as possible, you would be winning every card available. the people that want one would have to go nuts to beat you out of the card.

kevin

[sago]

IIRC, Don Lepore (dealer from NJ) had 3 Wagners in the late 70's.

[Koufax32fan]

I am only looking to buy 1 of the Pelty horizontals, for a "fair" price. I am in no hurry.

I don't understand the idea of hoarding, just to hoard. I do have some duplicates - one might be offcenter, one might have better registry, and I just have not found the right one. I am trying to find all of the poses for the Old Judge Doc Oberlander, but that is not hoarding.

A number of years back Ken Holtzman worked at our local JCC so I bought a 100+ lot of his cards on eBay. I thought he might want to hand them out to kids; he wasn't interested. I don't think of that as hoarding. Over time I have been giving them away. Who wants or needs fifteen 1977 Holtzman cards (look at the stache). The kids seem to like to have cards from the 70's (at least for a few minutes).

Is the motivation for hoarding really to try to corner the market and gain some economic advantage? Even the Hunt Brothers learned that is hard to do (or maybe it was the fact that they leveraged themselves to the hilt to buy all that silver). So, who is the guy buying cards of Titus or Pelty on margin?

[Cardboard Junkie]

Originally Posted by sago

IIRC, Don Lepore (dealer from NJ) had 3 Wagners in the late 70's.

Source on this please?Dave.

[vintagechris]

I estimate 3to 4K of each card still in circulation. You might be able to come up with a good estimate if you could estimate the number of people who collect the set possibly?

[sago]

Originally Posted by Cardboard Junkie

Source on this please?Dave.

There was an article in one of the trade papers, either Baseball Hobby News or SCD, that also had a picture of him holding all 3.

David