T206 Sweet Caporal Census Project

[steve B]

Originally Posted by 53toppscollector

The most interesting thing to me is that most of the T206 rules are not universal, and there are outliers. For example, I was just looking at two different 350 series cards in the PSA pop report and they have very different Fac 25/30 splits:

Byrne has (14) Fac 25s and (18) Fac 30s....not a big split.

Butler has (4) Fac 25s and (32) Fac 30s...a huge split

Other than this random huge gap in their Sweet Cap factory distribution, there is nothing else really distinguishing them. They have an almost identical total number of Sweet Caps, Byrne has none of the rare backs while Butler has only a BL350.

You are right, the majority of the Factory 25s are much more rare, but not in all cases. Which makes you wonder why. These oddities pop up everywhere, like the Tannehill above, the fact that the Exclusive 12 are so abundant in AB460 backs, while the rest of the AB460s are extremely difficult and low population.

The journey continues.

I'm thinking this has to do with what fronts were available in the printers at the time they filled the order. The ones with big splits are most likely either the end of a front run that was finished off using the 25 backs, OR fronts that were only available one particular time the 25s were finished.

The ones with more equal splits were probably available during different press runs.

That the data used weeds out duplicates is both proper and wonderful, as it makes the pop report data much more useful.

I think eventually we'll see groups of cards based on the splits between factories, and that will give a very approximate idea of what cards were on the same sheet.
One of the guys here did some work separating the 350-460s by group, and what he came up with was pretty impressive. Even more so when I looked up the pop report numbers, and all but two cards matched up nicely within those groups.