The Willie Mays price boom

[raulus]

Not that I'm saying the boom is over, because we're clearly a long ways away, but I was looking at the 1951B Mays in PSA 8 today. In part because Heritage had one in their auction that just closed a few weeks ago. In part because the price seemed notably lower to me.

From what is publicly available about sales for this item:

2/27/01 - $276K (Heritage)
3/7/01 - $338K (Goldin)
4/2/01 - $209K (Mile High)
4/20/01 - $204K (Heritage)
5/10/01 - $234K (Heritage)
12/6/01 - $264K (REA)
1/30/22 - $222K (Lelands)
8/28/22 - $162K (Heritage)

I guess my first reaction is that they were sure coming fast and furious between late February and early May 2021...

I guess we can also debate whether everyone being focused on the Rosen Mantle caused this piece to get less attention in the same auction.

And we can give props to Goldin for hitting the highest mark at $338K back in March 2021.

But from the tippy-top peak to the last sale, the price is down over 50%. Especially noteworthy is that it was 7 months since the last one traded, which is a bit of a drought compared to 5 in the course of 2.5 months. So if there was a bunch of pent-up demand, I would have expected the August 2022 auction to be up a bit, not down. I'm sure that someone will observe that the last piece was a bit off on the centering, so perhaps that was a factor.

Admittedly, this may just be a blip. The next one will probably be back at $250K+, and I'll go back to dreaming that people are less willing to trade gigantic mountains of little green rectangles with dead presidents on them in exchange for a single cardboard rectangle.

For anyone musing to themselves at home, in what turned out to be perhaps my single most prescient purchase ever, I picked mine up in May 2020 for $48k, although it won't show up on the publicly-available data because I picked it up from a retailer's website. I guess I'm only up 200% now, instead of being up 500%+. And I'm definitely okay with that.