I haven't posted over here or introduced myself yet, though I have been reading for some time, so I'll say first by way of brief introduction that I got back into collecting a couple of years ago after a long hiatus and collect mostly ungraded baseball Hall of Famers and graded baseball HOF rookies.
I'm generally dubious of efforts to try to predict the future on these things, but there's one card that doesn't seem to get mentioned in these kinds of threads that I think should be at least part of the discussion: the 1939 Play Ball Ted Williams.
I would think it has some room to grow for a few reasons. It is of top 5 player, and if I'm not mistaken is one of the few widely agreed upon pre-war rookie cards. While not exactly scarce, there are fewer graded than other major rookies (about 1000 graded between PSA and SGC, versus 2,000 for Mantle and 4,000 for Aaron, for example). It is a nice picture and a clean looking, classic card. Yet it can be had right now for the same or less than an equivalent Aaron and 1/4 of the price of a 1951 Mantle for mid-grade examples, with the discrepancy growing in higher grades. And it hasn't yet seen the run-ups in price that other major rookies experienced in the last couple of years. That seems to me to create potential for growth as more people turn to acquiring rookie cards of the very best players, which seems to be a current trend.
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