Memory Lane on the brain

[Snapolit1]

If I had to name one player from the second half of the 20th century who is criminally underappreciated by baseball fans and collectors it would prob be Frank Robinson.

Originally Posted by cgjackson222

In general, it seemed like "highest graded examples" did quite well, but some non-highest graded examples retreated slightly.

E.g. 1955 Topps Ted Williams PSA 9 (highest graded) sold for over $70K, which is almost $50K more than the last one sold in 2020.

1970 Ernie Banks PSA 10 went for $63K, which is more than $10K than one sold by REA in April.

1975 Gary Carter PSA 10 Rookie sold for $56K, which is $8K more than one sold for in a Memory Lane auction in February.

1957 Frank Robinson PSA 9 (highest graded) Rookie sold for $55K, which is more than $10K than the last two sold a month ago in REA and in April via Goldin in May, but not the record of $69K earlier in May via Heritage.

(Hard to believe the highest graded F. Robinson can't outsell Gary Carter)

Even some cards that weren't the highest graded ever, such as the '52 Bowman PSA 8 Mantle and '56 Koufax PSA 9 broke records.

But some that weren't "the highest graded" such as '33 Ruth #144 PSA 4.5, '34 Goudey Gehrig #37 PSA 7, Koufax PSA 8 Rookie and PSA 9 Koufax 2nd year did not break records, but were still much higher than 2 years ago.

All in all, prices continue to be very strong. (Note, I don't have VCP, so I am just using the PSA website, which may be incomplete/inaccurate).

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

If I had to name one player from the second half of the 20th century who is criminally underappreciated by baseball fans and collectors it would prob be Frank Robinson.

Agreed. Frank gets no love.

Also, it doesn't help that there was a weird white thing on his face near his eyebrow on the card.

[Donscards]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

If I had to name one player from the second half of the 20th century who is criminally underappreciated by baseball fans and collectors it would prob be Frank Robinson.

Yes Robinson is underated--he played during the era of Mantle-Mays-Aaron-Clemente--and he just didnt get to those 4 players prices--also played in small market cities and was a low key in his personality .

[atx840]

I believe this is trimmed, even REA thought so back in 2008.

https://memorylaneinc.com/site/bids/...e?itemid=71867

https://robertedwardauctions.com/auc...f-460-back-psa

[ullmandds]

Originally Posted by atx840

I believe this is trimmed, even REA thought so back in 2008.

https://memorylaneinc.com/site/bids/...e?itemid=71867

https://robertedwardauctions.com/auc...f-460-back-psa

Indubitably

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by atx840

I believe this is trimmed, even REA thought so back in 2008.

https://memorylaneinc.com/site/bids/...e?itemid=71867

https://robertedwardauctions.com/auc...f-460-back-psa

That's a great example of REA's honesty and Memory Lane's just pumping everything up.

I love it when auction houses are honest. Scott at Collector Connection is great like that.

I am not sure I'd love the brutal honesty if I was the consignor though.

[Aquarian Sports Cards]

Originally Posted by cgjackson222

That's a great example of REA's honesty and Memory Lane's just pumping everything up.

I love it when auction houses are honest. Scott at Collector Connection is great like that.

I am not sure I'd love the brutal honesty if I was the consignor though.

I appreciate that. I always let a consignor know when we have to offer a negative opinion on a piece and let them decide what to do. I do also explain that it makes people generally more accepting when we talk up a card, so overall it's a positive even for the consignors.

[111gecko]

I am continuously amazed at the prices of high grade/low pop cards now. Congrats to both side of these transactions.

1953 Topps PSA 9s:

#93 Rice $21,611
#201 LaPalme $20,432
#9 Collins $13,956
#95 Marshall $13,324
#269 Pillette $9,533
#31 Blackwell $8,333
#142 Wertz $8,065

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

If I had to name one player from the second half of the 20th century who is criminally underappreciated by baseball fans and collectors it would prob be Frank Robinson.

Warren Spahn.

With 363 career wins, Spahn holds the major league record for a left-handed pitcher, and has the most by a pitcher who played his entire career in the post-1920 live-ball era. He was a 17-time All-Star who won 20 games or more in 13 seasons, won the 1957 Cy Young Award, and was a three-time runner-up during the period when only one award was given for both leagues. At the time of his retirement in 1965, Spahn held the MLB record for career strikeouts by a left-handed pitcher. The Warren Spahn Award, given annually to the major leagues' best left-handed pitcher, is named in his honor.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Warren Spahn.

With 363 career wins, Spahn holds the major league record for a left-handed pitcher, and has the most by a pitcher who played his entire career in the post-1920 live-ball era. He was a 17-time All-Star who won 20 games or more in 13 seasons, won the 1957 Cy Young Award, and was a three-time runner-up during the period when only one award was given for both leagues. At the time of his retirement in 1965, Spahn held the MLB record for career strikeouts by a left-handed pitcher. The Warren Spahn Award, given annually to the major leagues' best left-handed pitcher, is named in his honor.

Yeah we've had these discussions and postwar it inevitably comes down to Spahn, Frank Robinson, and to an extent Musial; prewar Collins and Speaker.

[parkplace33]

I am blown away by these prices. Memory Lane does it again.

[Johnny630]

Originally Posted by parkplace33

I am blown away by these prices. Memory Lane does it again.

It was wow amazing. I can’t wait for REA’s big auction in the fall. I’ll be expecting more new record numbers from that auction.

[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.

[Exhibitman]

Heh, we may have the only soft landing in economic history.

[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……

[raulus]

Originally Posted by Vintageclout

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……

Yeah…I stay away from autographed items myself, and the market for autographed items recently seems to have gone completely bonkers. There’s also an issue with not very many pieces out there, and not much sales data. All of these reasons are why I stayed away from attempting to do any analysis. Plus, my sense is that the autographed market doesn’t really have a huge bearing on the non-autographed market, so the opportunity for crossover lessons was likely to be limited.

[Rhotchkiss]

Thank you for the Mays info. I collect/follow Cobb, Ruth, Wagner and Jackson (among some other players of that era). In my experience, each new auction generally brings records. I think these guys did not spike as much as the Mantles, Mays, Jackson’s, Aaron’s during the pandemic, they just remain on a steady, upward trend. Maybe they will go down, but they have just kept going up (at least since 2015) - before, during, and after pandemic. It’s great for the stuff I already own, but very annoying for things I want to own.

[gonefishin]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Warren Spahn.

With 363 career wins, Spahn holds the major league record for a left-handed pitcher, and has the most by a pitcher who played his entire career in the post-1920 live-ball era. He was a 17-time All-Star who won 20 games or more in 13 seasons, won the 1957 Cy Young Award, and was a three-time runner-up during the period when only one award was given for both leagues. At the time of his retirement in 1965, Spahn held the MLB record for career strikeouts by a left-handed pitcher. The Warren Spahn Award, given annually to the major leagues' best left-handed pitcher, is named in his honor.

Spahn is the most accomplished, under appreciated, player of his time. I agree 100%.

Not a name a lot of people recognize, but Bobby Avila is also an often over looked player. Bobby was the Mexican version of Jackie Robinson.

Frank Robinson never endeared himself to the public or press, i.e. Maris - Bonds - etc.

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Warren Spahn.

With 363 career wins, Spahn holds the major league record for a left-handed pitcher, and has the most by a pitcher who played his entire career in the post-1920 live-ball era. He was a 17-time All-Star who won 20 games or more in 13 seasons, won the 1957 Cy Young Award, and was a three-time runner-up during the period when only one award was given for both leagues. At the time of his retirement in 1965, Spahn held the MLB record for career strikeouts by a left-handed pitcher. The Warren Spahn Award, given annually to the major leagues' best left-handed pitcher, is named in his honor.

I'm with you, but careful Adam, you'll get the statisticians/data scientists coming out of the woodwork to tell you how Byung-Hyun Kim is so much better than Spahn. LOL

And Spahn lost 3+ full seasons at the start of his career to the war. He very easily could have been a 400 game winning pitcher. He's currently number six on the all-time wins list, but the three pitchers right in front of him, Pud Galvin (365), Christy Mathewson (373), and Grover Cleveland Alexander (373), are all within 10 games of Spahn in career wins. I think it would be a forgone conclusion that given those 3+ seasons he missed, Spahn would have easily won at least 11 games over those missing years, and ended up as number three on the all-time wins list as a result, trailing only Walter Johnson (417) and Cy Young (511). And depending on how good he was in those years, he could have ended up challenging Johnson for the number two spot as well.

Too bad wins don't mean much of anything, and Spahn has to look up to Kim though.