Relative value in regional sets?
 

So I'm looking at prices for iconic HOF rookies pre-1980, and there are a lot of these regional or oddball rookie cards out there. The graded population (at least the PSA and SGC populations) are often 1/10th that of the mainstream rookie cards, while the realized sales price is at a substantive discount.

We see this with the O Pee Chees and, more acutely, with all the random oddball sets. But the oddball sets are mainstream enough to have a PSA auction prices, ebay listings, and pop reports.

Intuitively, this doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps a stupid question, but in other markets for investible products, this sort of pricing differential would rarely happen. Any thoughts on why this is the case?

In short: Supply and demand.

The mainstream issues have robust demand. The oddball issues often have significantly reduced demand, even relative to their relatively low supply.

At the same time, as prices for mainstream issues rise, many collectors turn to oddballs as a reasonable substitute. A lot will depend on the issue, including how many are available, how well known it is, and how attractive it is. Size is also often an issue, as many of the oddball pieces are either a lot smaller or a lot bigger, and as such, many collectors aren't as convinced that they are the same as a conventional-size card.

But the bottom line is that oddball pieces are often lesser known and underloved compared to mainline cards. So they usually trade at a discount, with a few exceptions for really rare and desireable oddball pieces out there that serve to prove the general rule.

One last thought: IIRC from some of your other posts, you're new getting back into the hobby, so a little bit of history might be helpful. During the pandemic, the runup in mainline cards was breathtaking. 300-500%+ increases in value, and sometimes even more. While oddball pieces also jumped, the increase wasn't nearly as dramatic. Maybe 50-100%, give or take. While the gap has almost always been there, the gap has grown over the last few years.

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I was looking at the 1941 Play Balls or the 1948-50 Bowmans, which were much smaller than the "mainstream" sets in the early 1950s, and I figured that over time, whether a card is oversized or undersized relative to the norm isn't going to matter in the eyes of collectors. I wonder if this is a longer term arbitrage...

Could be!

Certainly there are any number of collectors who go around buying up currently underloved issues in the hopes that they'll get hot in the future and prices will rise. If you can buy them for next to nothing, then your risk is low. And if it's nice stuff that could pop when the market gets around to discovering it, then there's always a chance.

Thanks for the insights. I looked at some auction data and, indeed, that run up in pricing between 2019 and 2021 is amazing. And the pricing on some of the modern cards defies any rational explanation, at least IMHO.

As they say, it's easy to go broke trying to prove the market wrong. I suppose there's no harm in buying some oddball cards for the sake of having them. It just pains me to see what appear to be market mispricing of interesting cards and not try to act on it from an investment standpoint.

I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this piece.

I'm a Mays guy, and it always irritated me that Mantle got all the love while my man was terribly undervalued. Over the last few years, Mays has shot up even more dramatically than the rest of the market. While still not at Mantle levels, the gap has shrunk considerably.

And now it irritates me even more that I have to spend so much to get the nice stuff that I want for my collection. So be careful what you wish for!

You see the same pricing within the Topps flagship issues. For example, Mickey Mantle has six cards in the 1961 set which include his base card, AL HR Leaders, WS Game #2, 566' Home Run, AL MVP and All-Star. The base card is always going to be the most expensive, with any others lagging behind by as much as an order of magnitude. In these cases, it's solely a demand issue as the cards were printed in the same numbers with exceptions for short prints and high series cards.

Unless there is some extenuating circumstance, a player's main card in the Topps set is usually the most expensive of his cards for any given year (Topps Venezuelan is an example of an exception). Also regional issues many times do not have the eye appeal of the Topps issues - b&w photos, thinner paper stock, odd sizes, no team logos, etc. Looking forward, I don't see the 50+ year price differential changing any time soon.

Another way to research is to see the number of collectors of a player's Basic Topps Set registry versus the ones who try to collect every issue from their playing days, as well as what percent they're gotten completed. There are some OPC lovers who keep waiting for the day their Canadian versions rise up to the value of Topps, but there aren't set collectors vying for them like US Topps st collectors and PSA set registry participants, which is something that drives the high end of the market and sets the rest of the demand.