assessing vintage card scarcity

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Posted By: warshawlaw

I've done a pretty exhaustive analysis of the issuing habits of the Exhibit Supply Company, at least with respect to its boxing issues, in my book (plug, plug). From what I can glean, ESCO issued its 1921 cards for three years, its 1922 cards for two years and its 1923 cards for one year. It retooled in 1924 and then issued annual series until the Depression reusing the images from prior sets. The boxing issues are stat-backed and copyright dated, which makes conclusive analysis easier.

Here is the kicker: ESCO did not merely run the same sheets of 1921's for 3 years, it selectively added and removed cards from any given sheet as developments in sports warranted it, mostly by altering captions and changing information on the backs. The same can be seen in the PC-backed cards, where there were obvious alterations made to the card fronts (caption changes, background removed). Same is true of the Salutations DiMaggio and Williams--they show up a lot because they were reissued into the 1950's. This generated waves of short prints. Unless the cards fit into one printing sheet, with no duplication, there is no reason to think that identical numbers were printed of each card.

Given our inability to dissect the printing process at this point, I think Tim's "hunter-gatherer" methodology is the only one we can use to assess the population of a particular card type. While it would be great to see a statistical model on the cards, without knowing precisely how they were produced, one could not even begin to generate one. It would be division without a denominator.

Even if you had the production numbers, moreover, you cannot account for kids predilictions. When I was a kid opening packs, Hank Aaron went into a carefully treasured collection, Tommie Aaron went into a junk box for flipping. I wan't too diligent with the contents of the junk box. And checklists, fugetabout it--I'd throw them at things like kung fu throwing stars (really flew great, too; nice heavy Topps cardboard). The same undoubtedly is true of kids way back when. One of the rarest ESCO boxing cards is a statistics only card from 1927-1928. The unfortunate kid who yanked it from a machine 99 times out of 100 must have chucked it. I'd imagine that some dud player is the rarest card in many sets because no one saved him.