1952 Topps High Number survival numbers

Hello, I was wondering if my fellow board members had a rough of idea of how many copies of each card in the 1952 Topps High Numbers still exist. I have read the story of the back stock being dumped in the hudson, so I have always wondered just how many may still exist of each player in the series. Thanks for the help

Tony Turner

[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.

[vintagecpa]

It is remarkable that 1952 topps still command the prices they do when you consider how abundant they are.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by 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.

Was it in the hudson? I'd thought the dumping was offshore somehwere.
I've long wondered if the combination of water pressure and wax wrappers just might have sealed some packs. Finding the site in the open ocean would be nearly impossible, but in the hudson.....

Steve B

[ALR-bishop]

"Raise The Topps; The Second Hudson Miracle"....Clive Cussler

[toppcat]

Originally Posted by steve B

Was it in the hudson? I'd thought the dumping was offshore somehwere.
I've long wondered if the combination of water pressure and wax wrappers just might have sealed some packs. Finding the site in the open ocean would be nearly impossible, but in the hudson.....

Steve B

Best guess is around 1960 for this event, if it really happened. I know a couple of folks who think it was a PR ploy and as Topps has made up so much of their narrative over the years, that may be right. I guess we'll never know unless Sy Berger fesses up!

If this did indeed happen, the cards would have been dumped offshore of New Jersey, south of Long Island in the Atlantic Bight Dumping Grounds. I estimate a zero percent chance of anything surviving for 50 + years and considering what else has been dumped there over the years you would not want to touch it even if something survived!

[Zach Wheat]

The SCD article written in 1994 chronicling the 1952 Topps set indicates Berger thought Topps would sell the cards into the following year - which is why the stats line indicates "Past Year" and "Life Time" rather than an actual year. In addition, the article indicates around 1960 (agreeing with David) the excess cards were dumped in to the Atlantic.

MWheat

[Volod]

Which kind of begs the question: if they had been sitting in a warehouse for eight years, why did they suddenly have to be destroyed? If Topps couldn't interest dealers or collectors (such as they were) in taking them off their hands for a couple of hundred bucks, why not just put them out back next to the dumpster for the normal trash pickup? Was Sy just pulling the SCD writer's chain?

[steve B]

Businesses do some odd things.

A friend of mine got a nice lathe and an 1800's milling machine for a six pack @1981. A company had abandoned them at a moving company near our school and the moving co was rolling them across the parking lot to dump in a small stream. The milling machine worked, but wasn't saleable, the lathe was easily worth a couple hundred.

Another guy I know buys old stocks of bicycle parts from all over europe. One place he was buying a huge room full of rims, something like 3000 of them. Behind the rims were 30 lista cabinets. (Big filing cabinet like drawer units usually used to store machine tools) He asked what was in them and the warehouse guy had to check. He found they were full of Campagnolo parts a couple decades old and more. Figuring he'd be in trouble for not having sold or junked them years ago he told the guy he could have the rims for $1 less a hundred, but he'd have to take the cabinets too! The cabinets alone retail for roughly 1000 each and he figured the parts inside were worth over 50K. And he was being offered a discounted price on the other stuff to take them.

No telling if Topps really dumped them. If it was in the Atlantic dumping ground they'll be buried deep under NYCs trash of the 60's. Somewhere in the Hudson may not be much better, and chances of anything surviving are small, but it would be interesting to locate the site.

Steve B