1952 Topps High Number survival numbers

[Orioles1954]

My best guess would be tens of thousands of each card.

[GasHouseGang]

There are 18275 high #'s that have been graded by PSA (yes I actually added them up). What percentage of all the cards out there actually get graded? If we guess 2%, then there are 913,750 high #'s available. Since the high numbers are from #311 to #407 that's 97 cards. So that is 9420 cards for each high number. That's just doing the math, but how close that is to reality, no one knows. I would say this guess is still way too low. There are still a lot of undiscovered collections out there that would add to the number available .

[ALR-bishop]

I have no idea, but the math for 311-313 could factor in the DPs. I am not a graded collector, does anyone know how the 913,750 compares to the number of graded cards in the other series from 1952 ?

[GasHouseGang]

There are 144,852 total 1952 Topps cards graded by PSA. So just subtract the high numbers and you have your answer. 144852-18275 = 126,577 other series graded by PSA. So if we figure that's 2% of the total population of low numbers, we get 6,328,850. Is that close to reality? Who knows.

[ALR-bishop]

That's good enough for my purposes

[toppcat]

I would think valuable cards are more likely to be slabbed than those where it makes no economic sense to do so, so I'd wager the ratio of slabbed/unslabbed high numbers is different than the ratio for the low numbers. 9,000 high numbers available per card seem high to me; if there were that many I have to think prices would not be what they are, although I think there are more highs out there than their prices warrant.

If you assume something like 10% of highs are slabbed you get something like 1,800 available per card, which seems more realistic. Plus you have SGC, Beckett adding a little to the total so maybe 2,000 of each existing using that math. The problem of course is you don't know how many raw highs exist.

How many people actually collect vintage and of them how many do the 52's is another number you want to work out. Plus the grading of stars like Mantle and Mathews skews things.

[Volod]

Now that the statisticians have weighed in, I have always wondered if a lonely fisherman sitting in a rowboat on the Hudson in September, 1952 might have pulled up a grouper with a water-logged Mantle card in its craw.