[BobC]

Fred,

It is an interesting question, and one I see you asked on the Post-War side as well, and got virtually the ultimate answer on (1954 Blossom Dairy Charleston Senators), given your parameters. As others have pointed out though, your question does ignore cards graded by other TPGs, and has no way to take into consideration the number of raw cards that may be out there.

Plus, I think you may be ignoring a fundamental difference between Pre- and Post-War baseball card collectors. In all my years in the hobby I've noted that Pre-War collectors tend to not be as caught up in PSA's registry as their Post-War counterparts. Plus, the Pre-War crowd may not always be as concerned with set collecting, given the extreme rarity and difficulty in finding many cards and sets from the Pre-War era. Also, Pre-War collectors tend to be more of a true collector nature, and often prefer raw ungraded, cards. An additional issue in limiting your question to just PSA graded items is that PSA doesn't grade every recognized Pre-War issue out there (1928 Fro-joys, S74 silks), or they haven't been grading them continuously or for as long as the other TPGs (M101-2 Sporting News Supplements).

I think when it comes to Pre-War items and determining rarity, you are better off going to the PSA, SGC, and Becket sites (and I guess now add CSG to that mix as well) and simply seeing how many graded examples are being shown, in combined total, that are out there. You can then ask around if there are any known complete sets, just not necessarily all graded, or at least not all graded by just one TPG. When it comes to old, rarer cards, I'd be less likely to want to break out cards from one TPG's slabs so as to have them re-graded and slabbed by another TPG, simply to have the entire set graded by just one TPG. The potential for accidental damage to a card, or the potential for downgrading of it due to the perceived tougher grading standards of today, would leave me inclined to leave Pre-War cards as I found them.

Oh, and the cost and time factor of getting everything graded by PSA may be another deterrent, especially over the last couple of years.

Still a very intriguing question though.