Theories About the Existence of High Grade Vintage

[trdcrdkid]

Prompted by a query on this board from jsq, I recently went through every issue from the first five years of Sports Collectors Digest, from its inception in October 1973 to late 1978. (My recent post about 1973 card auction prices was one result.) One thing that SCD often did in those days was reprint newspaper articles about card collecting, of which there were a lot in the mid-70s as the hobby was starting to take off. Many of these articles focused on a single collector and appeared in his local paper. It wasn't unusual for these articles to mention that the collector had 20,000 or 50,000 cards, and several of them mention the hotel buying trips. I was just a kid at the time, and I remember hearing about such things after I got seriously interested in collecting in 1975-76, but there was no way I could have afforded anything like that on my 50 cents a week allowance.

One other interesting thing I found was articles in the mid-1970s decrying inflation in the hobby, even though any inflation up to that time was nothing compared to what was to come a few years later. Dave Meiners, a columnist for SCD, wrote a long two-part article in early 1974 ripping all the newcomers who didn't really care about the hobby and were causing prices to go up. He included a chart showing the year-by-year rise in prices of common cards from a bunch of popular sets, going from 1966 to December 1973. (I don't have it in front of me, but I think the average price of T206 commons went from something like 14 cents to 76 cents during that time, according to Meiners.) Then Dave Goldsman wrote a long follow-up article for the June 30, 1976 SCD, in which he extended Meiners' chart by going back through hobby publications from the previous two years and calculating common card prices for each of 60 sets every month from January 1974 to May 1976, and using these to create a "baseball card price index" with January 1974 being 100. He found that the index was at 161 in May 1976, meaning that card prices on average had risen by 60% in a little over two years, though individual sets varied quite a bit. The average T206 common sold for 83.7 cents in January 1974 but only 80 cents in January 1976. He had a chart showing the average price of some popular sets (1950-55 Bowman, 1951-74 Topps, 1959 Fleer, T206, 1970-72 Kelloggs) every three months over the two year period.

Three months after Goldsman's article, the September 30, 1976 SCD had an announcement of Jim Beckett's card price survey, which he was going to distribute at the upcoming Twin Cities card convention and by mail to anybody who wanted to fill it out. The results of Beckett's first survey were published in SCD in 1977, and the results of the second one were published in 1978, before Beckett and Dennis Eckes started publishing the Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide in 1979.

Oh, and Bill Mastro was all over SCD in 1976, with ads in almost every issue and an occasional article. In the September 15, 1976 issue he was selling a T206 set in vg condition, minus Wagner, Plank, and Magie, for $900.