Charleston v. Clemente

[aljurgela]

Hey guys,

A few years ago, I was doing some analysis and came to the conclusion that most negro league HOF cards were undervalued based on a "market cap" type discussion. I realized that many people did not follow my logic at the time and I just let it go.

Recently, I have been working on a "piece" that focuses on all of the negro league cards (all from Latin America) where I rank the cards, discuss value, pop report and issue idiosyncrasies. I am in revisions on the HOF list (63 total cards) and still working on the 250+ most important negro league non-HOF cards.

While I was writing a bit today, I thought that one of my examples would be an interesting discussion topic. Here is an excerpt from my piece:

As of 1/1/18 there are 27 graded Oscar Charleston cards (BTW I would be shocked if there were more than 50 total when adding the ungraded copies). If on average they are worth $20k (obviously some are more and some are less depending on condition), that would mean that all TPG Oscar Charleston cards from three different exceeding scarce 1920’s Cuban issues (Billiken, Tomas Gutierrez & Aguilitas Segundas) would be “worth” about $540k – sounds like a lot, right?

Let’s compare that to another great player who hails from Latin America – how about Roberto Clemente? For a quick comparison, let’s just focus on the 122 PSA 8 1955 Topps Clemente rookies – we will forget about the 11 PSA 9’s, 1 PSA 10 and the other 3,300 PSA graded Clemente rookies – and all of the SGC ones. I pick the PSA 8's because they are reasonably scarce with "only 122" copies, whereas Oscar Charleston cards are more scarce, but still available from time to time.

Even if we take the lowest Clemente price for PSA 8 in 2017 of roughly $20k (PWCC and HA both had sub $21k sales but there were also a number of $40k+ sales as well in 2017), the aggregate value of Clemente PSA 8 rookies would far exceed the cost of all of Oscar Charleston cards extant, by nearly a factor of five ($2.44 million vs. $540k). In fact, even the 11 PSA 9s would, on there own, far exceed the value of all Charleston cards (roughly $4+ million). When we include all Clemente rookies (remaining 3,300 PSA ones and the 1,100 SGC ones and and all of the other Clemente cards issued (1956 to 1973), this gap widens significantly. Let's just ignore all other Clemente cards for now.

It it hard for me to construct a case whereby the total value of all Charleston cards would exceed the value 5% of all the Clemente rookie cards on the market.

I find this a bit odd and my inner math tells me that I should expect to see the price of the Clemente's drop (indeed the PSA 8's had been selling for $40-50k and now have been in the mid $20k range of late), and the price of the Charleston's rise.

In the end, the market will be the market and the are "n" reasons why Clemente cards are more followed than Charleston cards (collectors today actually saw him, he was a hero to many, idol in Puerto Rico, tragic death, etc.), but I could do this analysis with virtually any post war player and / or T206 Hofers and the results would be quite similar, I imagine.

OK, I just put on my riot gear, so let the games begin!