1887 Old Judge survival rates???

[Leon]

Originally Posted by cyseymour

Certainly, but although pop reports may not be accurate, they can give someone a general sense of a card's rarity. For instance, if you see that a certain number of Amos Rusie's are graded, while three times as many Monte Ward's are graded, that can give you a general sense that Rusie might be about three times as rare as Ward.

I understand that there are lot of problems with crossovers and crack and re-submits, etc. But no one will no for sure exactly how many of a card are circulating in the hobby (unless it's very rare, perhaps). But for the general purpose of the beginning collector, I think that pop reports can be a good resource as a general guide, even if the only thing that is certain is that they are inaccurate.

The flaw in that thinking is that collectors generally get more expensive cards graded, thereby making a pop report erroneous when trying to figure a true population, not just the graded card pop.

[ullmandds]

what Leon said!!!

[cyseymour]

Originally Posted by Leon

The flaw in that thinking is that collectors generally get more expensive cards graded, thereby making a pop report erroneous when trying to figure a true population, not just the graded card pop.

The first sentence from my previous post:

"although pop reports may not be accurate, they can give someone a general sense of a card's rarity"

[Joe_G.]

Come on people, population reports can absolutely provide useful information/trends IF:

1) there is a sufficient sample size
2) avoid apples / oranges comparisons

There are always exceptions, however there is a wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 7,740 OJs that have been slabbed by SGC. An example of a good comparison would be to evaluate relative scarcity of HOFers within the set. Do not use the population report to provide an exact ranking, but instead provide a trend of most difficult and most common subjects. Likewise, as a Detroit collector I can look at population report for Stump Wiedman and Frank Scheibeck or Lady Baldwin and surmise that the 1888 Detroit OJs are more difficult than 1887 Detroits.

Keefe now has nearly 100 graded OJs (including his double player cards) and is the most common HOFer. I can say with high degree of confidence that he is more common than those with half as many graded examples (Welch, O'Rourke, Brouthers, Thompson, Clarkson, etc.). However, when looking at the four lowest HOF pops, I'd say there isn't a high enough sample size to definitively rank them (White, Robinson, Nichols, & McPhee).

An exception/risk would be if someone like John Drecker opted to send in his 50 or so Corcoran cards to all be graded. That would make the card appear far more common than it really is. I'm guilty of this to a lesser extent in that I only collect Detroits and have all my cards graded which artificially inflates the Detroit players population reports.

Here is an article I wrote back in 2005 when SGCs N172 population report was less than 1/3 of today's total yet the HOF rankings remain similar.

http://www.oldcardboard.com/eNews/20.../eNews17.htm#5